The advert says "Enhanced shadow catcher and included HDRI environments enable realistic 360-degree VR-like environments inside Poser"

The manual says the shadow catcher does not work in Superfly. So what' the point of that?

Also "VR-like environments inside Poser" really? How so?

Manual needs to be updated.  Shadow catcher does work in Superfly.

Manual needs to be updated.  Shadow catcher does work in Superfly.

Some diehards are intimidated by the Cycles rendering engine and are not willing to learn how to work with it.  Others use Firefly for webcomics and cartoon illustrations.  For that, you don't need physical-based rendering.

Some diehards are intimidated by the Cycles rendering engine and are not willing to learn how to work with it.  Others use Firefly for webcomics and cartoon illustrations.  For that, you don't need physical-based rendering.

Well when Poser 11 first introduced SuperFly it was a lot slower.  Now it out does FireFly.  

Actually there IS a shadow catcher in Cycles 2, which is in Poser 13.  So it does work in P13.  Another great selling feature.

Actually there IS a shadow catcher in Cycles 2, which is in Poser 13.  So it does work in P13.  Another great selling feature.

Boni posted at 11:02 PM Tue, 4 April 2023 - #4460823

Actually there IS a shadow catcher in Cycles 2, which is in Poser 13.  So it does work in P13.  Another great selling feature.

Could you please tell me how to activate it?

Go to the Material Room

Open GROUND material

Tick Shadow_Catch_Only

Render and enjoy your new shadow.

Go to the Material Room

Open GROUND material

Tick Shadow_Catch_Only

Render and enjoy your new shadow.

After I praised that feature ... I can't seem to get it to work outside the default ready scenes inside Poser.  Anyone know how to address this issue.  I want to use it in older EZdome files (Superfly friendly). 

I tried saving the setting from the wide street scene.  both the mat-room setting for the ground and the ground prop itself ... and it does't seem to work in any other scene.  What am I missing?

I think I read somewhere that stated older EZdome scenes wouldn't work correctly in P13.

Not sure how accurate that is, I never used EZdome, so just saying, it might save you frustration trying to get it to work.

What I've been doing is just use the widestreet scene and replace the default HDR in it with different sky HDRs from poly haven and a couple other places.

Those two scenes have an environment prop that doesn't exist in the default "alternate construct" scene, and I'm not sure if there's a way to add it.

So maybe you could try taking the backgrounds from your EZdome scene (if they're HDR) and using that in place of the wide street or beach scenes.

You would have to of course merge all the other content from those scenes into the new one.

You can also create your own HDRs in blender and use those, at least in theory. I haven't tried it yet but saw a video on it a few days back.

I'm still trying to figure all this out too so these are just things I would try doing myself, grain of salt and all that.

Would be nice if we had an official webinar on how to use all these new features and what their limitations are etc., but a month in and crickets.

Actually, with further experimentation maybe it's not working correctly. I can make a 2d object a shadow catcher; such as a cloth plane in Superfly, but not a 3d object such as the Hires Disk. Back to the experiments.

Very, very, very simple setup:
- 1 vehicle
- 1 square, scaled up, with only a posersurface node with "Shadow_catch_only" checked
- 1 hdri dropped onto the background, using a setup like this:

Setup the rotation's second parameter (it's radians: 3.16 = turned to the left 180°)
And this gives you this:

I rechecked and I was correct the first time. Bonnie the Construct is blocking your ez-dome. I started with an empty scene and everything worked correctly; 2d or 3d object as a catcher worked as expected. As I go to post this I see Y-Phil has posted a prettier image using the background node. Disk on the right is shadow catch only. Sorry about Ref_lite_Mult. checked. You'd think that would be off by default by now

I thought this was supposed to be a new feature. That was available in Poser 12.

I thought this was supposed to be a new feature. That was available in Poser 12.

EZDome works fine in Poser 13.
I have been using it myself with no problem.
I have also converted the Poser 13 HDRI starting scenes to EZDome scenes.
Also, I get better shadows with EZDome - the Poser 13 shadow catcher is making shadows much sharper than the other shadows in the scene.

Still, the Poser 13 shadow catcher is much easier to use than EZDome, so that's a good thing.

@Y-Phil: you made a typo, 3.14 radians is equal to 180 degrees.

The Shadow Catcher was updated for Superfly in P12.  It does exist in prior Poser versions but only worked in Firefly.

Just had to test it :) works well with GPU optix in superfly ( Shadow Catcher used on Background ) No 3D Ground

@Y-Phil: you made a typo, 3.14 radians is equal to 180 degrees.

The Shadow Catcher was updated for Superfly in P12.  It does exist in prior Poser versions but only worked in Firefly.

I have to confess: it wasn't a type but pure lazyness... 

I should add here that the shadow catcher setup may seem a little weird. The option to enable shadow catching in on the Poser Surface node for both FF and SF. And, In SUperFly enabling it on any material of an object will turn the entire thing into a shadow catcher. This is because in Tempest (aka FireFly) shadow catcher is a property of a material. In Cycles (aka SuperFly) shadow catcher is a property of an object. We implemented so it was mostly the same as users were familiar with the FireFly shadow catcher.

I was a bit confused when the shadow catcher didn't work with ezdome. After fussing with it for awhile, I realized that it doesn't work the same way in Superfly "Cycles" as it does with Firefly at all. Instead of rendering as a transparent shadow on the prop surface, it's rendering the shadow over the "background" shader--whatever that happens to be.

While that works when using "background" as the sole background of the rendered image, that has a few issues of its own. The biggest drawback is that the "environment texture" node gets displayed as a regular image in the preview, so you get no sense of camera orientation relative to the background without rendering first. Using a background prop, such as the one with ezdome, doesn't have that problem. The preview will properly show the same orientation and perspective that you'll get in render, no random guessing required. 

That of course leaves me back were I started... I tried to work out if the two can be Frankensteined together, but the orientation between them was completely off. I came across a tutorial, of sorts, in the Poser manual that gave some pointers. It's in the section Other Root Node Types, under "BG Environment". Using a positive value for the rotation offset (0.000000, 1.570000, 0.000000) in the Mapping node does the trick. The only noticeable drawback is that the "shadow catcher" prop leaves a faint black outline.

If you use the Environment Preview, it's about 90 degrees off from the background. You can set it at a U_offset of 0.25 to have it match the rotation of the background for a visual and then hide/delete it for the render. Keep in mind the rotation in the Mapping node is in radians rather than degrees.