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iest_rob 1,671 posts
Hello. I've rendered a pass of the scene im currently working on without the object I'm animating visible. Then I've gone back into the scene and applied a 'Use Background' Shader to pretty much everything that the animated object will cast shadow on, but there is a problem with the shadow's colour. I want the shadows to be Navy Blueish (moonlight) - not black, but whenever I render something out it comes out straight black. Does anyone know how I can make it so that the scene object casts the correct colour shadow as oppose to the black?
I have set the shadow colour to be the Navy Blue i wanted on the lights, and it comes out fine within the scene render i did, but it's just not coming through in the 'Use Background' shader.
Thanks
-Iest
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MikeWilson 638 posts
YUP!
select your camera, and go camera attributes, in the Environment pulldown theres a color slider, just change it to whatever you want.
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zachm 1,230 posts
ok man, have I got a treat for you here. Make everything in your scene black using a surface shader with the matte opacity set to a value of 0 (black). Then set all your objects and make them so that the primary visibility is turned off. (you can do this through the attribute editor, it's faster than going through them one by one.) Now take your lights and make them black as well, but put the shadow color to a solid red, green, or blue. this way when you render, you can just take that layer in after effects, or photoshop, and isolate that shadow, blur it, change it's color, anything you want. The reason for the red, green, or blue, is so you don't have to render out multiple shadow passes for the different shadows from different lights, if you have one light of your three (i'm guessing) then you can isolate those shadows, and put different colors, or blurs on them.
If none of this made any sense, here's an example with some pictures that I found.
let me know how it works out man.
-Z
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hype 2,964 posts
thats how we deal with shadows at R&H. i don't know how they set it up on the 3d end (they probably have some proprietary plugin that just automatically makes them render in RGB), but in compositing, that's what we get. different shadow files with each channel representing the shadow from a different light.
great tip zach!
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zachm 1,230 posts
Yeah, it's super easy to set up in maya if you use render passes, just select al the stuff in your scene, make a new render pass, and change the stuff in the scene for that pass. takes about three minutes to do it on a pretty big scene I set up the other day.
-Z
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iest_rob 1,671 posts
Holy Cow Zach! That sounds awsome!! Im definatly gonna give that a whirl right now! Thanks man!
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iest_rob 1,671 posts
I'm having a bit of trouble understanding what's going on here.
I've done a new clean scene to try this out. Ive made a Cube over a flat Plane, created one Spot Light in the scene and made it to cast shadows.
I've then created the Surface Shader, changed the 'Out Matte Opacity' to pure black, grabbed my Cube and Plane, and in the Attribute Editor I've un-checked the 'Primary Visibility' under 'render stats'.
I've then gone to the spot light, change the light colour to pure Black, and set the Shadow Colour to solid green. Now when I hit the good old render button, it render's out nothing, just pure black, and when I hit the Alpha channel to see is there's anything at all being rendered, and it doesn't show nothing at all - am i doing something wrong?
Thanks
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iest_rob 1,671 posts
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MikeWilson 638 posts
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iest_rob 1,671 posts
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MikeWilson 638 posts
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JayG 1,164 posts
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zachm 1,230 posts
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iest_rob 1,671 posts
Hey Zach - nice one, thanks a lot for including the scene file, I understand whats happening much better now. But - I dont understand how compositing this bad boy works now, because the plane that the spring sits on is being rendered as well, so when I overlay the shadows over the scene, the blackness of the plane is there as well - am I doing something wrong?
Thanks again man
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zachm 1,230 posts
well, when you import it into after effects, you want to ignore the alpha, and then import the layer for each color channel. So you would have the footage imported once into your scene, and three times into your composition. So you have one in the timeline for each light. Now you want to go to effect, channel, set channel for each one and select either Red, Green or blue. then you can tweak out the color, blur, ect.
-Z
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iest_rob 1,671 posts
Damn! If i only i understood After Effects! How do you choose to ignore the alpha? Sorry about all these questions Zach!
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hype 2,964 posts
CTRL - F
or under the file pulldown menu, choose "Main interpretation"
at the top of the box that opens are 3 little radio buttons for selecting how AE interprets the alpha channel. if there is no alpha channel, they'll be greyed out.
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zachm 1,230 posts
that, or you can even right click on the file and choose interpret footage. That's how I always do it. But ctrl+F is prob. cooler.
-Z
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iest_rob 1,671 posts
Nice one! Thanks guys! It's probably too late for me to open AE and have a play around tonight (2:15am) and I've got to get up in 5hours to drive the GF to work - but ill defiantly give it a try tomorrow morning.
Thanks a lot for your help here, it's much appreciated - there will be more questions to follow no doubt!
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iest_rob 1,671 posts
I've had a quick playabout with this, and I'm ashamed to say i still don't get it im afraid.
I get the whole ignore alpha bit, but how do i import the image into the color channel as well as into the scene?
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zachm 1,230 posts
hey man, no problem. I would try to explain it here, but it would take a page or a video tutorial to get it all across. So I set up yet another simple scene file. It's a 6.5 AE file, so if you're using 5 or just plain 6 still, then shame is the game. So you can break this file apart and see the effects I put on each one to separate the color channels. And the adjustment layer on top is just to show off.
hope it helps man.
get the goods here....
-Z
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MikeWilson 638 posts
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iest_rob 1,671 posts
Hey Zach - Im having a spot of trouble downloading the file - any ideas?
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zachm 1,230 posts
now give it a try, I think the
http://www.was screwing it up. oops.
-Z
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iest_rob 1,671 posts
Hey Z - I've downloaded the file - but Im afraid shame is the game! I don't understand why these guys cant make newer versions of these software backward compatible.
I know this is asking loads - but if you've got time could you maybe whack up a little tutorial - video or image based & text - for someone like me who hasn't got a clue about AE.
Thanks man
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zachm 1,230 posts
i'll see what I can do. What version are you using currently?
-Z
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iest_rob 1,671 posts
Excellent Zach! Im running Maya 7.0 and After Effects 6.0.
