Hi there. I'm new and I need help with multi-scene rendering.

Hello. I’m having a problem. I need to know how I can have a plane in one scene receive a shadow being cast by an object in a completely different scene. I couldn’t find anything online, so I came here. Hopefully, some of you masters at Blender can be of help to me. Thank you!

-Official R!CO

Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Compositing and Post Processing” (though compositing is just one way to do it… you’ll likely also take advantage of linking objects between scenes, too).

Could you possibly direct me to somewhere where I can learn how to do that or show me how if you feel like it?

Let’s start with a few basics first. Are you using the a same render engine for both scenes? Will the shot be animated? Is your plan to have both scenes in the same .blend file, or in separate .blend files?

Same render engine, No animation, and same .blend.

I just want to know how the shadows can be seen on the ground plane which is in another scene than the object that’s casting the shadow.

Let’s say you have two scenes in your .blend file. We’ll call them Main and Shadow. In Main, you have just your object. In Shadow, the scene is identical (use linked objects), except it also has a ground plane in it. Then, back in the Main scene you can composite the two renders together. If you’re rendering with Blender Internal, you can set the plane to have a shadow-only material. In Cycles, set the ground plane to be a shadow catcher object.

Let me know if you need an example .blend file.

Thank you so much. I think you explained it to me pretty well but I think a .blend example would be extra helpful just to make sure, so if you don’t mind…

Sure thing. See if this file does it for you.

Thank you so much! That should be it. I’m so glad you helped me.

FYI . . . The notion of linked assets is very fundamental to Blender: you can link to things in other Scenes, or in completely different files. If, for instance, a prop appears throughout the film, you can define the prop once and then link to it. You can also construct sets, which incorporate linked assets, and link to them. (Blender understands multi-level linking.)

The concept has been intrinsic to Blender since its very earliest days as an internal-only tool developed by a now-defunct software company. Learn about it, and how to use it well.

I often use one or more Scenes in a particular blend-file … sometimes the scenes themselves are links … so that I can then link to all or part of those Scenes in other Scenes. The whole idea is to leverage the linking concept to minimize work and to promote consistency between shots. (Especially when you change something, knowing that the change will be instantly reflected by every other file that links(!) to it.)

For instance – if you’ve got lots of uses of a particular Scene, but one which incorporates that “object from another Scene,” one way to describe that “but one” scene is to create a new scene which links to its ancestor (to thereby pick up everything from it), then links to the added asset(s). This new scene becomes a way of grouping the assets (and scenes) from several prior sources, without duplicating anything. Everything is linked, not copied.

Yeah. I used to know all that. I stopped Blender and picked up Music for more than a year and forgot all about Blender.
What’s funny is how I actually started making music because I had the brilliant idea to try and use Blender’s Vid Seq editor to make simple tracks and beats. They had pitch-shifting and you could even export the sound files out as a .flac or .mp3, and that struck the entire thing! That’s why I’m not so into Blender anymore. I just remembered it now and remembered how fun it was a year ago. I’m back now and ran into something I found familiar, but couldn’t remember how to do. If you feel like it, I could send my SoundCloud to you in a private message. Then you could see what led me away, and what I’ve been spending my time on xD.

Thank you again for all the help. It really worked this time!

-Official R!CO

Oops. Wrong person. It’s ok. Thanks though. I still meant the thank you.