The Best Way To Work With Blender's Shadow Catcher Pass 

This has to be one of the best comments I've ever got! Thanks a lot!

This is interesting. Happy to hear there are multiple ways!

You're most welcome, mate!

Hey man, super glad I was able to help you out! Cheers! And indeed, let there be shadow, with alpha.

Hey, you're most welcome! And thanks a lot for giving my tutorial a shot :)

Thanks! Yeah, the shadow catcher improved a lot. I hope guys at blender give us more passes in the future or improve the overall workflow in compositing.

Hey, you're most welcome! And thanks for the 1000 thumbs up!

Thanks a bunch mate!

You're most welcome! Also, ironically, even I do the same :)

Glad you found it!

Anytime!

Ay! My pleasure :)

@@TheInfinites anyway could you fix the discord invite link?

@@frontliner3697 Done

@@TheInfinites Thnks!

Happy to hear mate!

Most welcome!

Most welcome!

Most welcome!

Hey man, reflections are a bit tricky. I'm still figuring out that part myself.

Anytime mate!

Thanks!

Most welcome mate!

Anytime mate!

Most welcome!

Most welcome!

Anytime!

Cheers!

Hey, so if you just enable shadow catcher and turn on transparency, you won't get the shadow as a different pass. You need to create another render layer and do some extra work to get it as a separate layer. On the other hand, if you enable the shadowcatcher pass, you get a grayscale image. The above method is the best of both worlds with minimum effort :)

@@TheInfinites Hi. Well thanks for letting me know, I hadn't ever needed to do it but was really curious, thanks, I understand now.

Hey, you can connect your final output to the composite node. In your render settings, just select exr or png. Alternatively, you can view your final shadow using the view node, and then just hit Alt-S and save the image. Then all you have to do is, use the image as an albedo texture.

Happy for you, mate!

You're welcome! Glad it worked out for you.

Hey, if we're talking about older blender versions that don't have the shadowcatcher pass, then you'll have to go for the old-school duplicate layer method. Btw, which blender version are we talking about here.

@@TheInfinites I believe it would be the most updated version. I ask this because I work in a studio where we sometimes need to send the shadow pass in the exr for this render to be used in the final composition of the film. However, when we migrated to the newer version due to new features, we noticed that the shadow pass was eliminated. something I couldn't understand why.

@@vyctor0rj Hey, the 4.0 version still has the shadow catcher pass. Are you using 4.0 as well?

You're welcome mate!

drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dApfXpC2CyaPjmSeohedLlAMPMSKzRmX?usp=sharing Link for the case, might be helpful for me if you help :)

Thanks!

Hey, I understand your problem. Let me try something on my end. Fingers crossed :)

@@TheInfinites That would be great. As I said, I've made some experiments but they did not really turn out well.

I believe I've answered your questions on discord. Let me know if you have more :)

@@TheInfinites yes you did, thanks so much!

@@rikocribbs9334 Anytime

Don't think that's possible. I'm hoping in future blender just gives us a reflection pass.

Hey, the shadowcatcher pass still exists. I'm not sure why its not showing up on your end. Are you sure you are on Cycles?

@@TheInfinites Thanks for the answer! Yes, I'm in cycles. I didn't say that Shadowcatcher doesn't exist. I have it. But when viewing it as a separate render pass, I have a white screen and I checked with the Exposure node that there are no variations in the information. Of course, I managed to get the shadow from the combine pass. But this is the wrong method. Previously, Blender had a separate shadow pass renderer, just like Maya, for example. Now I have dozens of objects in the scene and there is no shadow on them at all. It is only available in the diffuse direct pass. But it contains a lot of unnecessary unnecessary information for the shadow pass. I am a passionate fan of Blender, but this point was made either not obviously (I see many people on the Internet swearing at it), or not very smartly.

@@MrGravicaper Interesting. You should be getting shadows for your object. Do you mind sharing a screengrab of your node layout so I can better understand it. You can also join the channel's discord server. And sorry for getting back so late :)

@@TheInfinites Thanks for the help offered. I was offered an interesting option to use override material. In one motion, without spoiling the scene, he repaints everything in the scene as if it were made of white plaster, all this looks like a pass of shadows, although without a shadow gradient. But there is an occlusion pass for this and it will greatly help with this point. I'll try this technology and if it doesn't help, I'll return to your suggestion with help. Best wishes!

Hey, I’ll be online. You can share it.

Ah, a bit confused as to what you want to achieve here. Do you mind elaborating it a bit?

You need to click on the image icon (placed on top) and toggle through.

Hey, unfortunately, blender doesn't give you a transparent shadow pass. Hence this tutorial haha

@@TheInfinites so...basically to reap the benefits of the shadow pass, you *must* use Blender to do the compositing of your render passes? I'm not new to 3D, but I am new to Blender. Was formerly used to rendering passes with alpha, and then compositing in After Effects, which is what I assumed would be the case with using shadow catcher/shadow pass in Blender. But it looks like you're saying that is *not* the case and in order to really use the shadow pass w/ alpha as intended means you have to also do the compositing in Blender...am I understanding that right?

@@rikocribbs9334 Hey, I can understand it's a bit difficult to work with blender passes. It certainly is the case with blender cryptomattes. Currently, it takes some extra bit of work to get them to work in nuke and fusion. The tutorial is just a way. I'm sure there are other ways and could possibly be more efficient than mine. And these techniques can be used in different compositing softwares. But tbh, yeah, it's a bit of a hassle to work be blender cycles passes outside of Blender.

@@TheInfinites Ouch. I was afraid of that, haha. Granted this is just one way to work with the passes, and I've been watching some other tuts as well to see what they say...but yea, there seems to be a general consensus that working with passes outside of Blender is just not a great way to try spending your day lol. Not super "integration friendly" with other editing softwares. As always, thanks so much for the explanation! It's invaluable to have such a broad community online and people genuinely willing to respond. Makes a big difference (:

@@rikocribbs9334 yeah blender passes are really friendly with other softwares and tbh, the compositor haven't been getting a lot of attention. We rarely see new features added to it and it still is very slow. Hopefully things will change in the near future. Also, yeah, the blender community is totally awesome! The best out there!

Hey, you might wanna use different view layers to achieve that. Pretty sure that will do the job.

@@TheInfinites thanks, definitely gonna give it a shot

Thanks

I think you can convert it to a grey-scale image by using a color ramp node.

@@TheInfinites yes but then i lose the reflections

@@cogosoda6452 yeah. I usually end up renderering the reflection pass seperately. Don't use the one that comes up with the shadow catcher. Hopefully, the future versions of blender will have a reflection pass. Do you mind telling me what are you trying to do?

@@cogosoda6452 You're gonna have to get real creative here by mixing and merging the passes.

@@TheInfinites im making ui for a game, i need to have the ui background separate to the ui elements and the reflections that the ui elements cast onto the background

Hey, I may need a screen grab of your node tree to see exactly what's going on. I'm currently working on a project and that too is in 3.5 I'm also using this shadow catcher technique and it's working fine for me.