Hi all, as in the title, I'm using both to place a car in a background image but I am not satisfied with the shadow especially near the tires that seem like lifted; the settings for the shadow buffer are:
resolution 128x128, blur size 1 and bias 0.88. these ones gave the best outcome and I can't do better.  may anyone help me? thanks

the attachments.. oh bother

Have you tried ray traced shadows? I never use shadow maps anymore. And do you have the DCG plugin with the GI catcher? I guess that would help a lot too.

raytraced shadows are sharper and not so realistic with the shadow catcher; shadow buffer works fine; which plugin do you mean? is it free?

I use distant light with 1500 inch radius smoothed shadows.  I never tried shadow buffer.

It does render slower.  But it looks like you are not using inches for scale.  So no worky for you.  I'll give it a try and post here.

Ignore the car for a minute.  But look at the shadow under the car.  Is this what your are trying to achieve?  This is just raytraced using a plane with a shadow catcher as its top shader.  Ambience is at 20% with distant light at 25% and shadow intensity at 75%.  Shadow softness is set to "good" with 1500 inch light radius.  The Ray Dream car is to scale rather than what it originally imported in at 4 inches.

The distant light brightness was decreased to 10% and its radius was increased to 6000 inches.

Sky Light and Indirect Light were enabled.

By the way, the color used for the plane was black, so the shadow under the car would be black.

DCG's GI Shadow Catcher plug-in was not used in anyway to create either scene.

I made the comparison with your settings Shonner; it seems to me the blur is not yet perfect, however I'll make my homeworks. thanks
attached test with shadow buffer (1' 38'') and with raytraced shadow (3'33'')

...

Here's another try.  I've never messed with the shadow buffer before.  But this one was done using DCG's GI Shadow Catcher.  It works the best for this kind of stuff.

The trick here is to turn off Ambience and set the HDRI Background lighting to 200% so that the infinite plane doesn't appear in the render.  Then lower the brightness back to 100% using a photo editor.

Shonner,

Try reducing the Max Brightness setting on the GI Shadow Catcher if your plane is showing up in the render. That setting gives GI Shadow Catcher a reference of where the full lighting is. Anything below that it considers to be in shadow, anything above is lit. The shadow catching plane is showing up because it thinks the light is too dim. If you reduce Max Brightness, it will expect that level and the plane won't show.

Regards,

ok, that's almost perfect for me shonner! I guess I'm going to give a present to myself; by the way Eric is there any sales promotion or discount at DCG at this time?

Prode,

I don't have any deals going on right now for just a single plug-in, but there are some deals to be had if you're buying more than one.

For example if you add just Enhance:C to your basket and select check out, you'll be offered $5 off a few plug-ins that go well with it (i.e. other shaders). Terrain Tools, Ground Control, and Anything Grows also do the same sort of thing if you add them to the basket alone.

Also, if you're looking to buy a bunch of stuff (4 or more), contact me ahead of time and most of the time I can work a bundle deal specific to your needs.

Regards,

allright, I made my tests and finally ordered this easy plugin; very useful indeed. I wish to thank you, Eric and Shonner for your endless patience and willingness. have a good year