Has anyone figured out how to make the ground invisible, but retain the cast shadows in PP-11? In PP-2014 (and earlier) you could just check the 'shadow catch only' in the mat room (with the ground prop selected) and render your figure or props with cast shadows and no background. That doesn't seem to work in the PP-11 version - at least using the Superfly engine. It still renders the background which I pretty much never use.

I've tried everything I can think of to render just the figure with shadows without the background... I've tried making the default ground (a hemisphere, actually) invisible, but the the figure renders with no cast shadows. I've tried using a ground plane prop, then checking 'shadow catch only' but the ground plane still shows up in the render. If I just make the ground plane invisible, again the figure renders with no cast shadows.

Any ideas??

This is what I'm encountering...

Here's Pauline with the default Poser ground/hemisphere.

Try as I might, I cannot make this background go away without losing the shadows.. Here's Pauline with the ground/hemisphere made invisible ("visible" unchecked in the prop's properties tab):

I've tried with just Firefly in PP-11, and still cannot get the 'Shadow Catch Only' to work there, either. Is this a bug or am I just missing something? I'll be contacting SM about this as well, but just thought I'd toos it out and see if anyone here has any ideas.. Any Beta Testers out there?

If I recall something I read even though firefly can use ground shadows only ... Superfly.render engine cannot because of it's more "real world" lighting.

Bzzzzt! How many times have I caught you people saying something "cannot" be done in Poser and then I do it.

For heaven's sake, do your minds forget so easily that there are others who can solve puzzles you cannot?

Bah - I'm not going to show you.

I would say "be nice" but why?

Shadow catch only works in P11 in Firefly -- on the ground prop itself.

with ground

with background picture

with pink background color only

However, I have no idea how to do this in Superfly. Maybe if we point out to the BB-guru-master-overlord that the OP did open his post with a question, "Has anyone figure out how...?" he'll come back and enlighten us. :)

I believe, in the Cycles render engine when using Blender, a shadow pass is generally done through using layers or in compositing.

Here is an article how it's accomplished in Blender, I'm not sure if or how well this would transition to Superfly but it may give some ideas to people who know the material room well. http://uo3d.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/blog-post.html

I even tried the 'shadow catch only' in Firefly in PP-11 - same thing. It still rendered the ground prop anyway. If I unchecked the 'visible' tick box in the properties tab, away went the ground prop - and the shadows. I even tried using a primitive ground plane prop. Same thing. It's either all or nothing.

Per BB's comment, I'm sure it can be done - it's just eluding me so far... Oh well, I've got it, so I'll play with it and use PP2014 for my 'serious' stuff. I can always spiff things up in Photoshop...

bagginsbill posted at 12:12AM Sat, 21 November 2015 - #4239908

Bzzzzt! How many times have I caught you people saying something "cannot" be done in Poser and then I do it.

For heaven's sake, do your minds forget so easily that there are others who can solve puzzles you cannot?

Bah - I'm not going to show you.

Renderosity forum reply notifications do not function AT ALL.If you need me to answer something, ask elsewhere.

So, are you over at RDNA still? I'll pop over there... Yeah, I don't get the notifications either - another 'revolutionary' improvement, I surmise.....

bb, just repeating what I read ... but I'd love to be proven wrong ... cuz that would be great in Superfly!

Boni, if I find an (the) answer rest assured I'll post my findings here for everyone else's benefit. Not having been part of the development team for years like certain others here, it might take me a while, but if there's an answer out there, I'll find it. I have submitted a ticket to SM regarding this, so hopefully I'll get a useful answer instead of being made to feel like an idiot for asking the question in the first place. ;-)

Razor42 posted at 10:44AM Sat, 21 November 2015 - #4239950

I believe, in the Cycles render engine when using Blender, a shadow pass is generally done through using layers or in compositing.

Here is an article how it's accomplished in Blender, I'm not sure if or how well this would transition to Superfly but it may give some ideas to people who know the material room well. http://uo3d.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/blog-post.html

Hey, good to see you're still around, buddy! I thought you jumped ship after the last 'revolutionary' iceberg was hit. Thanks, I'll check out that thread - I need to learn a few things about Blender anyway, so I can play around with creating some new stuff. It's a hellova lot cheaper than C4D! LOL

Seriously? The OP asks a question about how to do something, Not stating that the program can't do it just that they don't know how to do it and they get "Bah - I'm not going to show you." as a response from bagginsbill?. What happened to the ideal of share the knowledge to help other people? It is this sort of arrogance that too often ruins a thread that otherwise could have contained some useful information and maybe even a solution.

Yeah, I'm not sure who pissed in his Wheaties, but, oh well.... If I find a work-around or an answer I'll post it here. I'm sure there will be updates and service releases as we go forward, and I do have a ticket open with SM. So that's what I'll do - move forward. ;-)

keppel posted at 1:45PM Sun, 22 November 2015 - #4240131

Seriously? The OP asks a question about how to do something, Not stating that the program can't do it just that they don't know how to do it and they get "Bah - I'm not going to show you." as a response from bagginsbill?. What happened to the ideal of share the knowledge to help other people? It is this sort of arrogance that too often ruins a thread that otherwise could have contained some useful information and maybe even a solution.

Wow! •• Seriously the only thing I would have to say to BB, is Thanks for all your work in supporting Poser and helping out the average user 10,000's of times at least over the years. But hey good luck with that crit of him and approach, I'm sure he feels suitably reprimanded ;)

@RodS Still about now and again. I do check the gallery too very occasionally, but it just pains me to see the state of it these days, so very rarely comment at all.

Hope you find your missing shadow :)

@Razor 42 - Am I missing something here? BBs' post appears to imply that he has an answer to the question asked but chooses not to reveal it. Why even reply to the thread at all if that was all that he was going to say? So what if he has helped 10,000 times in the past, are you suggesting that his response was appropriate or warranted on this occasion?

I'm just saying BB's contribution to Poser and the Poser communities over the years has been so prolific, that he has earned the right to express himself however he likes IMO. If you feel different that's up to you.

Use a simple plane such as the one sided square for the ground and tick shadow catch only.

keppel posted at 11:34AM Sun, 22 November 2015 - #4240131

Seriously? The OP asks a question about how to do something, Not stating that the program can't do it just that they don't know how to do it and they get "Bah - I'm not going to show you." as a response from bagginsbill?. What happened to the ideal of share the knowledge to help other people? It is this sort of arrogance that too often ruins a thread that otherwise could have contained some useful information and maybe even a solution.

My comment had nothing to do with Rod. It was Boni I was reacting to. I'm really tired of people saying things as if they know the answer. The correct answer from Boni, if any answer should have come, would be "I don't know" instead of "Superfly.render engine cannot because of it's more "real world" lighting." That's doubly untrue. It can't directly do it because the programmers aren't quite up to the task. It doesn't have anything to do with real world lighting. Everybody talks about Cycles like it's a strict PBR but it isn't. It has PBR features, but can also do completely unrealistic things as well, like toon shading.

Meanwhile, I do believe that the shadow catching material isn't available at this time because SM didn't expose enough for people like me to manipulate the rendering process. I know, mathematically, how to make a Bsdf that does this. I also am pretty sure I know how to write a post-processing script to do it. But I don't have time right now.

Let's all move on - think of me as the cranky grandpa who hands out $100 bills so you put up with him. I do not mean to offend, although I do anyway, when all I meant is a sharp rebuke. Some think I don't even have the right to rebuke. Well - block me then. I am prone to irritation.

Meanwhile, like I said I think I have a solution but don't have the time to try. Here's my theory.

Set the ground plane (or whatever prop) to 50% transparent, and use a simple white or gray diffuse value. Assuming you're using an infinite light (i.e. uniform lighting) the areas in light will be one value and the areas in shadow will be another value. (Roughly speaking)

Now after the render is over, the pixels with 50% or so in the alpha channel are the ground plane pixels. The value in there will be the original diffuse value cut in half (i.e. premixed for alpha blending)

It's a simple matter, then, of running over each pixel and collecting a histogram of those values that are 50% transparent. This should give roughly two groupings of luminance. Those that are above the median are in light, and those that are below the median are in shadow. Boom - you now have the data you need to replace the alpha values with any pair of fully or partially transparent values you want for shadowing. For those pixels you modify, you then set the color to black.

Save back as PNG and it should work perfectly.

A script like this can be written for Poser, so that it's all done in Poser. The script would use the Python Imaging Library (PIL). There is already a post processing script in Poser that uses PIL so this is not a big deal.

So I just picked this Teddy up off the ground plane and went to hand it back to the little boy in the pram who'd thrown it out... but he had turned into my cranky grandpa! And all the time the shadows were only half of what they should be. :)

Googleing "cycles shadow catcher" gives several tutorials, so the question is if enough of Cycles is exposed to the userto utilize the same techniques...

In Blender shadow catching is accomplish using the compositor; I don't think that Cycles alone can do it (IIRC there were requests for this functionality but they were not implemented).

So Cycles has features that allow it to be a PBR but it isn't a true PBR? What about Lux, Octane, Pixar's Renderman, and Iray? Are any of them true PBR or is there no such animal?

icprncss2 posted at 5:36PM Mon, 23 November 2015 - #4240351

So Cycles has features that allow it to be a PBR but it isn't a true PBR? What about Lux, Octane, Pixar's Renderman, and Iray? Are any of them true PBR or is there no such animal?

have a look here for a basic introduction into PBR: https://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-theory

or here to https://www.allegorithmic.com/pbr-guide

icprncss2 posted at 10:16AM Mon, 23 November 2015 - #4240351

So Cycles has features that allow it to be a PBR but it isn't a true PBR? What about Lux, Octane, Pixar's Renderman, and Iray? Are any of them true PBR or is there no such animal?

In every engine you can write shaders that e.g. throw away energy conservation. With these tools you to do the right thing but, if, for any reason, you need to do the wrong one, you can still do it. Tools for grown ups who need neither training wheels nor shackles.

waiting to see if there is a way to do this without compositing the shadow layer and the object layer in an external program, something akin to the firefly shadow catcher.

shedofjoy posted at 2:41AM Tue, 24 November 2015 - #4240574

waiting to see if there is a way to do this without compositing the shadow layer and the object layer in an external program, something akin to the firefly shadow catcher.

Me, I'd just use the Firefly shadow catcher and composite that way. If there were a script to strip all the materials off every item in a scene, it would even be a pretty darned fast render.

Just noticed your sig: "Poser for Android" LOL. Not for those much over forty -- at least until eye surgery and/or viewing technology improves dramatically. I already have to practically wear surgical loupes just to make a phone call on those things. Texting is out of the question. (Why I got rid of my cell phone.)

@moriador , I thought poser on phones was a long long way off hence my sig, although watching Microsoft tech demo their new phone is essencially a laptop, to plug it via usbc into a small hug which is connected to a tv and keyboard and mouse and viola you have full windows 10, quiet impressive, not sure on the render capabilities, but still a step in the direction of portability......should add make Cortana more user friendly, it can open poser but that's it so far....lol