OLD LUXCORE - Shadowcatcher not fully transparent

[Asticles]

Hi all,

This maybe is not a bug, but since the begining, shadowcatcher material is not transparent as it should.
Look at the images, on the left: Lightwave's shadow catcher on a plane with a gradient background.
On the right, luxcore one.

Best regards.

[B.Y.O.B.]

The lower half of the environment light has to be black.
Also, you should use a sun light only (no sky) if you want a pitch black unrealistic shadow like on the left.

[Asticles]

Thanks for the response,
On the left there is no gi, this is why the shadow is pitch black.
So, it only works with Hemi with upper hemisphere?

[Dade]

BTW, there is a dedicated flag in LuxCore for rendering the lower half hemisphere in black

[B.Y.O.B.]

In theory you have two options:

• use sky light and set ground color and ground albedo to black
• use HDRI and enable "sampleupperhemisphereonly"

However, the second option does not seem to work when I test it here (the plane is still lit from below).

[Dade]

However, the second option does not seem to work when I test it here (the plane is still lit from below).

It is lit by indirect light, "sampleupperhemisphereonly" disable direct light sampling of lower hemisphere but doesn't change the correctness of the rendering. It was introduced for LDR images: http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopi ... 10#p120871

But back in topic, I have lost a bit the track of the problem, what is exactly the problem ?

@Asticles, is the shadow too "bright" ? Have you tried to set the material of plane to something nearly black ? Or have you tried to limit the max. path depth to render only direct light in order to compare "orange" to "orange" with Lightwave ?

The plane should no be visible at all outside of the shadow, can you post a test scene ?

[Asticles]

Sorry Dade,

To me the topic is to have a feature without workarounds and conditionals. I think shadowcatcher should be bulletproof and work always.
I've post the Lightwave example, but it also works with Gi enabled.

I've seen that setting the shadow material to diffuse you can control the color, but if you set the color to pure black, the shadow catcher fails.

The test scene was only a plane with the man and the hemi lamp.

[Asticles]

Maybe I'm wrong, but I prefer less features but rock solid than more features but working only on specific conditions.
IMHO.

[Sharlybg]

Maybe I'm wrong, but I prefer less features but rock solid than more features but working only on specific conditions.
IMHO.

This is why we are doing testing. Trying to improve everything but step by step.this is why it is called an alpha stage.

[Dade]

To me the topic is to have a feature without workarounds and conditionals. I think shadowcatcher should be bulletproof and work always.
I've post the Lightwave example, but it also works with Gi enabled.

I've seen that setting the shadow material to diffuse you can control the color, but if you set the color to pure black, the shadow catcher fails.

The test scene was only a plane with the man and the hemi lamp.

In my tests with a plane and an hemi lamp is working fine. I guess you have some setting different from mine. I can try to figure out what is going wrong alone but having an example of the problem could probably save me a lot of time.