Old option "Shadow only"

I have a scenario where I have 2 characters that will be illuminated by two lamps that will not generate shadows projected on the scenario, but each of them will have a “spot” type lamp that will project their shadow on the ground, only these two lamps are illuminating the character and I don’t want that. In Blender 3.4 I didn’t find the “Shadow only” option, where is it? I saw some solutions and for my case the solution using material nodes on the characters doesn’t work, as it would affect all the lamps.

Hello and welcome back :smiley: !

Unfortunately this isn’t possible anymore, cycles being a pathtracer (and eevee trying to match cycles) this is quite difficult to acheive.
what render engine are you using ?

One possible way is to look into light groups : these allows to render different set of lights separately as render passes.

These passes you can add them together to recreate the render.

Now if you use cryptomattes you can probably isolate your characters and mix different ligths on different parts of the image at the compositing stage.

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Would be better if you show some images of what you’re looking for. Isn’t very clear. But I believe that is a shadow catcher. For that, add a new collection, move your asset then right click the collection > View Layer > Set Indirect Only. Object will become invisible but will cast shadow. After you can also set your background as shadow catcher, Object Properties > Visibility > Shadow Catcher, and export shadows only using compositing tab, render pass Shadow Catcher. This render pass must be enabled in View Layer Properties.

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Hello, thanks for the welcome, I’m coming back to Blender after almost 10 years. It has always been a hobby, but currently I have some ideas to make money using it. :stuck_out_tongue:

But then, I solved my problem another way. I removed the two “spot” type lamps and replaced them with one “sun” type lamp.

Then, I adjusted the “sun” type lamp and then I also adjusted the parameters of the other lamp in the scene, but this one does not cast a shadow.

Finally, I saw a tutorial on Youtube teaching “catch the shadow”, using an “invisible” plane and some configurations in the nodes of the material, but with the shadow of the characters projecting on the plane.

I’m generating images of these characters for a book and I did the first tests and the characters were generated without shadow, so I put a plane, but the plane would be rendered along with the shadows, so I looked for a tutorial to mitigate this.

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Hi Lucas,

Exactly, I solved my problem with a shadow catcher, to generate characters with an alpha background and shadows projected on the ground over an invisible plane. Thanks for the answer. :smiley:

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