I’m exploring moving away from keyshot. There, I set up a rendering with a ground plane to render a transparent shadow and I make my objects invisible to camera.
(the reason for that, for those that would ask is, if you just use something like cryptomatte or clown masks, etc, you’ll get a half pixel halo between the render and the shadow. Rendering the entire shadow also allows for some “slop” later if a change is made.)
I then render just the product, but need ground shadow visible to reflections, but not to the camera. Without that, the bottom of your objects reflect the environment too much (especially if you’re lighting mostly/entirely with hdri environment).
I’m not looking for you folks to show me exactly how to do it. But I’m not sure how to go about it in Blender. I don’t mind searching for how to go about things myself. But I didn’t know how to search for this. I want to figure out how to output all of what I need in one go also. The goal would be to set up a file with all the correct outputs with node hookups for things like denoising, cryptomatte output, shadow layer, etc. Then I can just use that file to drop in a new object, and render again.
Keyshot is much faster at data translation, decal/label, and material application. Also it has HDRI light studio sort of built in, which makes lighting pretty darn fast. So I’m trying to use blender to see if I can save time on the back-end of things instead. Most of my time right now is spent in photoshop assembling, setting up masks for adjustment layers, cleaning up the shadow (keyshot can’t render Black shadows, which is so dumb They don’t sample alpha, so black on black doesn’t get sampled), etc.