I’m trying to do a simple scene with a flat plane for a "floor"and some text. I want this floor to be pure white but be able to still cast shadows from the text but I cannot find the settings to remove the shadow effects from the plane/floor.
There’s probably a simple solution for this but I couldn’t find it with the search function.
Yes, its a gradual darkening from the light source to the edge of the plane. I’ve tried adding light sources as you suggested but it produced an undesirable effect on the rest of my objects, the text in this case. :no:
I did find that if I set the world color to white and then specified the “only shadows” option under the materials then I got the effect I wanted but I do not think this this is the best or proper way to do it.
Do you have your elements seperated into render layers? If so then you may be seeing something like this:
This is the result of diffuse shading and specular highlights being passed between render layers due to shared lights. To make matters worse, the plane on the left has Transparent Shadows enabled so that even though the Shadow Pass has been excluded from the combined image (CTRL Click and you can see the little black dot in the “Shad” button on the render layers tab) the shadows are completely visible anyway.
The plane on the right seems to have a shadow but it really doesn’t have one . This is the result of the cube layer being visible in the scene layers but not actually rendered with the plane render layer. The area that appears to be shadowed simply lacks specular highlights in the diffuse pass because the cube is blocking them from reaching the plane.
You can prevent this from happening in a couple of different ways. The first is to disable Ray Tracing and not use shadows. OK, so that’s out of the question. The second is to use engineer your lighting setups so that they only affect the layer that they are on (via the layer option for the light in it’s material buttons) or to use exclusive light groups which is a material based option or to have the render layer “See” only layers containing the objects and lights that you want to use to render. The third is to use the “Light:” field on each render layer tab to use only a specific light group to illuminate that render layer. The fourth is to split your elements into scenes in the same manner that you have your render layers set up.
If you are now thoroughly confused then see my post here for a better explanation and an example .blend file: