Is there a way to bake the shadow catcher?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Hi!

I need a shadow on a transparent plane.

Using the shadow catcher in cycles does that. But I have found no way to bake the effect. I can certainly render it out from the perspective of the camera. But what I need is to bake it so I can have a shadow on a transparent plane. So I can have a shadow on a transparent texture for the plane obj.

Is this possible?

Thanks in advance.

2

Hi.

Already 42 views and no reply. I also couldn’t find any info online. So I’m guessing this might not be possible in Blender?

Or should I post the question somewhere else in the forums or maybe a different Blender forum is recommended for that area of Blender?

3

Hello.
In Bake options there’s a Bake Type: Shadow.
It should give you a black and white image that you can now plug into Alpha socket. [Note: it is inverted]

I think Blender doesn’t bake transparency straight into Alpha channel (not exactly sure about that), but you can create a new RGBA image and set Alpha in the Compositor or an external editor.

4

Hi.

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I ended up using a workflow similar to that and did the rest in Gimp.

But it would be incredibly handy if Blender could bake transparency into alpha. But nobody seems to know if it can or not. So maybe it means it can’t.