Hello, I was wondering how to use the shadow-catcher in EEvee-next (blender 3d 4.2). The correct method to make EEvee-Next’s raytracing work.
Sadly, Eevee cannot do a real shadow catcher. There is a trick that can be used to fake it though.
Eevee’s raytracing is, for now, only screen space raytracing, so it’s not full raytracing with all the capabilities like Cycles can do.
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Hello, ok thanks for your answer, I will watch the video that you linked to me. I will tell you if it worked.
Kind regards
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It worked! Thanks for helping me 
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Hey community, the approach in this video only works for area lights not for other light types such as area light, spot light etc. Is there any solutions for other light type?
Welcome!
Eevee isn’t built to do shadow catching. I don’t think there can be a solution for every type of light.
If you want to work with shadow catchers, you will need to work in Cycles.
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gotcha. Thank you for the response! Still hope EEVEE-nect could support that feature one day! This could be really helpful in many use cases.
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It would be. However, the shadow pass tends to thankfully not be very heavy to render, even in Cycles. When you use the shadow catcher, that’s usually because large sections of the image don’t get rendered and use an existing photo background.
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gotcha! Yeah was trying to avoid comp since I am trying use blender as a backend service. If add comp will increase the overall render time. but maybe like you mentioned it wont be that bad.
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Actually I have some follow up here!
Ended up this technique does work for other light types. The only requirement for it is that you have to make sure the entire ground is fully lit otherwise if its too dark its still consider as a “shadow”.
And you can insert a Color Ramp node between Shader to RGB and Mix Shader to set up the white points to decide the cut off point by yourself tho. With that trick you can get a clean shadow on ground, and of course you will lose some ramp details in soft shadows somehow.
Another downside of this technique is that you will lose all the bounce lights within the ray tracing (Since you have to switch to Blended from Dithered in Render Method ), so for best result, you might need to combine this trick wtih comp feature.
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