Help with replicating the Shadow Matte node from the Arnold Renderer

[Goldy5009 (Goldy)]

Hey! This is my very first post here so I apologize if I do something wrong here. Arnold has a node called “Shadow Matte”, which allows you to use tint stuff like shadows, add a shadow onto a material, or use backlighting. AFAIK Blender and Cycles doesn’t have something like this at all, would there a way to recreate this type of node in Cycles? I don’t really wanna pay for Arnold just for this one type of node I want for a project…
Here’s some image examples!

Any help is appreciated with getting this result or replication in Cycles!

[DNorman]

Tip to manipulate shadows with the light path node

This is a tip to answer a question on unwanted shadows, I thought it would be interesting for more people, so I have posted it here. You can use the light-path node to stop specific objects from casting shadows, like this: [shad1] (for it to work in Eevee you have to set the materials shadow mode to alpha clip or hashed in material settings) Note the cube does not cast a shadow. You could also use it to change the colour of the shadow (Cycles only, Eevee will just bring the grey shadow bac…

Colour change is cycles only.

It does not really change the shadow, it changes material for shadow rays.

[Goldy5009 (Goldy)]

I’ve actually seen this post before I made this post myself! It doesn’t really do what I need unfortunately, also doesn’t solve how to do the backlighting Arnold does either.

[DNorman]

Yes it is limited, not like the Shadow Matte.

[zeroskilz]

Sorry, late to the party but here is a partial solution which will require some compositing to work…

Set Film to “Transparent” and then set the background ambient color to the color you want the shadow to be:

[Goldy5009 (Goldy)]

This could work!..if I could somehow only get this effect on one material however.