New Shadow Catcher Features in Blender 3.0 | Cycles X Tutorial 

I can’t get Any reflections on my shadow catcher.

@@Guest_1138 I have several test renders a few months apart during the beta and sometimes there are reflections and sometimes there are not. It seems they were going back and forth debating whether to have the reflections be automatic and allow the users to skip using the compositor. I guess they decided to force us to use the compositor :(

@@Guest_1138 if I’m not wrong all you have to do is set the reflections in the material of the object you made a shadow catcher, the same way he changed the normals in his material but easier.

If i understand that right, all reflections are also in the "Shadow"catcher pass. So i dont need an other Layer with the Glossy Indirect pass?

glad it was useful Spencer cheers!

yeah, i did that as well

Can you shed me some light how to do this before the 3.0 version? What are the passes and what's composited? If you don't mind, no pressure. Cheers! :]

@@vextormull I actually did a video on it a while ago for 2.8. Unfortunately, there's only English text within the video, no audio. But it goes over reflections + shadows: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0ZdGa5Vg0Gg.html Edit: for something more recent, I believe CG Geek did a video on it too

@@SpencerMagnusson thank you very much!

It is a more advanced topic for sure. In this tutorial I only gave an overview of the scene reconstruction process to focus on the shadow catcher part. But if you are interested in trying it out, you can search for "Blender fspy tutorial" on RU-vid and you will find plenty more in depth tutorials. Thank you for liking the video anyways Mo, appreciate your support! All the best with your 3D journey

I still can’t figure out how to get reflections on the shadow catcher. How is it standard?

@@Guest_1138 I actually have not tried it yet with the new version. But typically if you turn the shadow catcher into a shadow catcher and then give it a glossy material about the same color as the surface in the video you are trying to cast shadows onto, it works(mostly). But I think there's more to it to get it to work well. I keep meaning to try the new version but I have had very little time.

@@BlenderRookie I tried a glossy material, but the moment you add a material, the shadow catcher aspect goes away. And it no longer shows up in the shadow catcher pass. Much less reflections it’s like the shadow catcher become totally invisible and is not rendered at all.

thank you Chris, I am also looking forward to creating more composites with Blender!

thank you Jeff, shadow catcher objects still affect the scene via indirect light, so their shader sure does matter!

my pleasure Michael glad it was easy to follow

thanks Richard happy to hear that

my pleasure cheers

avec grand plaisir merci!

happy to hear that Alejandro thanks!

thank you Stefan always a pleasure

my pleasure Khan cheers

glad you found it interesting thanks!

How should I enable the Shadow Catcher? In preferences?

I might be mistaken, but I believe there are individual reflection, shadow and light passes you can activate

Hello Alej, Brecht informed me that more improvements to the shadow catcher are coming including a separate shadow and reflection pass. I have added the information among others to the pinned comment.

@@karijoart not seeing a pinned comment

When you select multiple objects in blender, and for example click on the shadow catcher visibility checkbox, it will be enabled or disabled only for the one object you selected last. For the other ones that you have selected, the shadow catcher visibility checkbox will not change. If you want to enable or disable it for all of the selected objects, press and hold the "alt" key, and then click on the checkbox. Pressing and holding the alt key allows you to change parameters on multiple objects at the same time.

hello you might have downloaded the wrong file, I find it can be confusing on github what to download. After clicking on the link in the video description, scroll down to the "Download the add-on" section and click on "download the latest version". On the next page, under Assets, click on the "fSpy-Blender zip file". This should work in 3.0

@@karijoart thank you for the info! Will definitely try it after this

you are welcome, thank you for your feedback. Search for "Blender camera mapping tutorial" on RU-vid for that part

haha 3D composite successful

I'm not 100% sure but i believe this is also a reflection catcher. Or it's built into the updates shadow catcher. I'm away from my computer so can't check.

More shadow catcher improvements are planned, such as: separate shadow and reflection passes & a dedicated compositor node for easier setup. I added the info to the pinned comment among others.

@@karijoart super excited for that

It doesn't look like you can. Blender doesn't support this at all and currently it's not even scheduled to implement any of that.

yes it does matter, shadow catcher objects will interact with other CG objects via indirect light interaction.

I believe that in this case you should enable the environment pass, and multiply the shadow catcher with the environment pass.

@@karijoart Thank you! It works!

Hi! I see that your comment is an old one, but good question -- since no one else responded I'll share my thoughts with you (: Things like color theory are good to study in general, if you want to be a quality visual *designer* no matter what field you go into (graphic design, motion design, illustration, film...) but strictly to be a 3D animator I wouldn't say it's a high priority. What's helpful is having a clear vision of the kind of animator or designer you want to be. Do you want to be a generalist who does a bit of everything? Or do you want to specialize in certain aspects of 3D animation? To just be a great *animator* focus on getting high quality motion in your work (learn to manually edit key frames and master the graph editor, learn tools and shortcuts to get faster so you can spend more time on the overall quality, study how things move in real life to get realistic motion in your own work). I'd say studying graphic design principles is very helpful if you want to do more commercial work (btw color theory is not exclusively a "graphic design" principle, but "typography" is, gestalt principles are emphasized in graphic design too). If you aspire to work in the pipeline at an animated film studio, like Pixar/Dreamworks/Disney, I'd recommend you figure out what you wish to specialize in and then focus on those disciplines. It's rare that you'd do "a bit of everything" at a large studio, so I wouldn't say graphic design is that critical in those roles. Whereas, working for smaller creative studios/agencies or freelancing as a Motion Designer -- you will likely wear different hats and need to be much more versatile, so you'd want to have strong design chops to be able to stay on trend (or ahead of trends, if you're really gifted). If you'd like to do animations that incorporate typography, such as title designs and show openers/teasers, I'd say having solid graphic design skills will certainly elevate your work compared to those who "just wing it" and maybe are completely self-taught (don't seek out lessons or critique from others) or those who only studied animation with no design. But to just be a great *3D animator* and have an impressive animation demo reel, you don't *need* any graphic design skills. I went to an art school for college. Majored in Computer Animation for the first 2 years, where I learned traditional 2D animation (old school paper flipping and all that) and then 3D animation. The CA department taught students to use Maya for everything 3D. But through my experiences and many talks with professors who had "retired" from studios I dreamt of working at (Pixar, Dreamworks, Disney, Sony, etc) the industry lost it's romance for me. I realized that pipeline wasn't going to align with my true passions. I couldn't see myself working as a character animator for 5 years and still loving it for the next 5. So, before I got so deep that I felt "stuck" in that major -- I changed my major to Motion Design. It really opened up so many more possibilities and they taught us many more programs (After Effects, Cinema 4D, Nuke, Illustrator, InDesign, etc) which helped equip me to be a much more versatile designer/animator. I can say that I've been able to land a lot more jobs in the real world as a motion designer than I ever would have as a 3D character animator. And my rates have consistently increased with my experience. Anyway, I feel like I have a unique perspective of being in both "worlds" and now having been in the professional world for about 10 years I can tell you that you absolutely do NOT need to be good with graphic design to be a great 3D animator. Just like you don't need to be good at drawing to be a great 3D animator. I've known artists who can't draw to save their life, but they have a kickass animation reel. Just depends where you want to see yourself in the future (: Sorry for the super long reply, but hope it helps a bit!

@@rikocribbs9334 Thank you very much for your time and advice :3 but a question, what is the difference between being a motion designer and being a character animator? (independent 3D and 2d animator) Please 😅😆😇Thanks

@@danielaorbegosobracamonte8276 the main difference between being a character animator and motion designer is that as a "character animator" you specialize in animating (typically) bipedal/quadrupedal characters with full ranges of emotional/facial expressions...some characters may not have arms or legs, but they have very expressive body language to compensate. As a character animator you'd kind of be an "expert" in that stuff -- the emoting and movements of characters. You could be a 3D or 2D character animator, or both! But animating the actual characters is pretty much all you do in your line of work. There's some big differences between 2D and 3D, but there's also a lot of overlap in the overall principles...and 2D does not always mean "traditional"/"hand drawn" animation (cel animation). I'd say there's a much bigger difference between hand-drawn cel animation (a form of 2D) and computer animated 2D (some examples: Amazing World of Gumball, Futurama, honestly most 2D cartoons these days are computer animated 2D, not drawn frame by frame). Being really skilled at using (and understanding!) graph editors for computer animation (2D or 3D) is super valuable -- if you do want to be a good character animator. As a "motion designer" you might find yourself animating characters on *some* projects, but you probably won't be an "expert" character animator (and you don't need to be, to be a good motion designer). Motion designers usually work on a wider variety of more short-term projects, whereas character animators are usually hired for longer-term projects such as being hired on for a full length animated film (think Dreamworks/Pixar/Sony movies) or being a character animator for a full season of an animated series on TV (think Netflix/Cartoon Network/Nickelodeon shows). A motion designer might work on animated bumpers or whole broadcast packages for TV networks. They may get hired to do the animated special effects and compositing for things like car commercials and sports ads (green screen work). Motion designers are the people designing and animating all of the Netflix title sequences that play at the beginning/end of a show or movie (and titles for movies in general, I mention Netflix because they have a whole team of motion designers dedicated to working on title designs and animations -- I believe they often pull in freelancers too). I'd say nowadays the line between what we used to think of as "animator" and what we now call "motion designer" is getting more and more blurred all of the time. A lot of independent motion designers LOVE incorporating characters into their work, so it requires them to be at least pretty good at character animation. Other motion designers avoid characters at all costs, they hate trying to animate faces and bodies...they prefer special effects, using physics simulators in 3D programs to get realistic looking water or fire, stuff like that. Others might just stick to animating logos and text for commercials/ads. There are so many areas of focus to choose from, there's really endless opportunities. That's probably the biggest reason I decided to switch direction and go into motion design myself (:

you don't need a shadow catcher for what you are trying to achieve. What you need is the action figure photo to not be visible in the final render, but cast a shadow into the 3D scene. This can be achieved with a 3D plane, with the action figure cutout with transparency as the shader, and the 3D plane object camera ray visibility disabled.

You can still use the shadow catcher with transparency in Blender 3.0 if that is your preference. To do this enable shadow catcher on the object, set the film to transparent, and do not enable the shadow catcher pass. However this will use a simple approximation for the indirect light. With this method you will not get colored shadows for example. The shadow catcher pass is more accurate. Why do you need transparency?

@@karijoart Oftentimes I use shadow catcher with transparency for product images, which can be used in powerpoint B2B sales pitch presentations. Product picture with slight shadow gives more depth and it looks professional on white (or just plain color) powerpoint slides. It would be great to get more control in compositor over shadow catcher pass, as today I have to render the shadows separately and additionally adjust them in photoshop. A nodes solution in combination with ColorRamp would be a huge time saver.

​@@karijoart Sorry the late, Joseph. My client always wants everything thing editable.

@@karijoart Hey! Shadow catcher pass has a grey background for me which darkens the whole image when multiplied. Is this my mistake or is this just how it works?

same problem

its just for cycles X

You can still use the shadow catcher with transparency in Blender 3.0 if that is your preference. To do this enable shadow catcher on the object, set the film to transparent, and do not enable the shadow catcher pass. However this will use a simple approximation for the indirect light. With this method you will not get colored shadows for example. The shadow catcher pass is more accurate. Why do you need transparency?

@@karijoart In my case because I want to control the contrast of the shadows in another application (Davinci Resolve). This is for a motion tracked segment. Now, if I want the new and improved shadow catcher (which looks great!), I have to render the original segment with the shadows burned in to the files. It makes it much more to difficult to change only the shadows and not affect the rest of the files. If I had the shadows separated that would not be an issue. To add insult to injury it is not possible to raise the level of contrast in blender since that makes the whole part of the image brighter (not just the shadows). Because of the white background, I guess.

this will work in Blender 3.0 and not the previous Blender versions. It uses a new shadow catcher pass that has been added in Blender 3.0.