I am trying to create a propasal for some additions to an existing sculpture to some people for approval. I have adequately if not elegantly, modeled, positioned and textured the sculpture, proposed additions, and room it resides in. I have placed four tube lights and a spot light and repositioned the default distance light to mimic light through a window. When I render I'm getting a kind of negative lighting effect that I can't get rid of. The shadows are lighter than the lighted areas; turning up the ambient lighting makes the scene darker. Also, things with metallic procedural shaders turn black when rendered if I designate them as 'shadow catchers' which I assume means that shadows should fall on them (the term is not defined in the manual as far as I can see). I have applied a texture map to some parts ot the sculpture but also want them th appear metallic--shiny. No matter what I do with the shader tree settings for Highlight, etc. they appear dull with grayed out color as compared to the jpeg texture image. This part of the project seems very near to being finished but these lighting problems have to be solved to make it useable.

Is there a way to get a print out to scale on indiviual models?

with these kind of things, it always helps if you post an image.

but let me try anyway...

shadow catchers are used in conjunction with composited live footage or backdrops. basically you model a primitive object of something that appears in your backdrop photo, line it up in the right place, and set it to be a shadowcatcher. it will render invisible, except for the shadowed area, which will appear to fall on the objects in the backdrop.

hopefully that makes sense.

since you've modeled the actual room, you don't want to be using shadowcatchers. objects in carrara will always accept shadows, as long as the objects or lights that would create said shadows are set to "cast shadows."

hopefully this helps produce more desireable results.

-pix

To reiterate what pix said, 1.) Don't use shadow cathers. 2.) For metallic shiny things, it can be deceptive because you need something to be reflecting off of them. They may be black because they're reflecting black. -Kix

"the term is not defined in the manual as far as I can see" Did you try looking in the index? The proper use of shadow catchers is explained on pages 394-396 in the C2 manual. However, as it's already been pointed out, in your situation you do not need them at all.

In other words, a shadow catcher is an object that only "caches" the shadow. In other words let say that you want to render something on top of a photograph, but the photo has an object that the would have to interact with the shadow on something modeled in your seen. You model something to mimic the object on the photo to catch the shadow of your model and make it look more realistic once you do the compositing work on an image editor like Photoshop. It is only meant to distort shadows for compositing work.

The main problem that you might have is that you haven't included a reflection map on your seen. I ran in to this while getting acquainted with Carrara.