Falcon Shadow Catcher?

Is there still no way to have a shadow catcher using Falcon Renderer? I know the Shadowmat doesn't work, but is there some other work around? The majority of my renders are product shots. So I pretty much use a shadow catcher in nearly every scene.

I know I can render separate passes and then composite, but it would be easier to do all in one render.

Thanks!,
 
Unfortunately Shadowmat is still not working in Falcon. Cheetah render won´t do it?

Cheers
Frank

Ok, thanks for confirming. I wasn't sure if there were any work arounds. I started with that, but for some reason the lighting underneath the clear lens is way too dark. I've tried adding some lights, but then I get some blown out areas. I've tried a few things to figure out what's causing it, but haven't been able to track down the issue. I have transparency turned on for my lights and have used some render tags to adjust for Radiosity. The light path bounces should be enough to make it through the two surfaces. Everything looks correct once the clear lens leaves the holder. I was going to just render some different passes and then composite them in Final Cut Pro. I'll attach the current file. Most likely some of the settings have changed since I've been testing to find a way around it. I'm sure it's probably something simple, but I'm stumped. :)

Muddy ClearLens.png
 

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As I guessed; Paper Profile and ARH-150 Frame occupy the same space (z-chasing) at frame 45 and following. The Paper Profile is moving between frame 0 and 104 along Z-axis what you can check at its property. When you delete the keyframe at frame zero everything seems to work fine.

Cheers
Frank
 
Ok, I'll investigate again. I sometimes put some keyframes on frame 0 to block in an animation. Although I should go back and clean them up. I put that point animation at 0 because I noticed that the paper spline was slightly over the edge of the clear lens insert. I viewed this from a top view scrubbing the timeline marker, but I should go frame by frame to examine it closer. Thanks as always for the input.
 
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Thanks for having a look guys. This partially popped up because I have to manually line up keyframes across different objects after doing the initial animation. It's a real p.i.a. without a dope sheet to retime this stuff. After I finished I noticed that the spline was crossing into the clear lens, so I adjusted it, but I also added a keyframe at marker 0 in the timeline to make sure it stayed where it was. Since C3d always defaults to Smooth F-Curves instead of Linear, it almost always adds some overshoot to the animation. I try to stay on top of switching the F-Curves to Linear, but this one slipped through. It's extremely hard to see the spline cross over into the holder frame in top view, but that's what's causing it. It's much more visible with the clear lens turned off and viewed in perspective. Cheers! :cool:(y)

P.S. Zoo, I don't use Falcon very often (mainly because of the missing shadowmat function). Upping the glossy there does make the render look better. I'll have to remember that for the future.
 
Nice animation by the way. I like the action of the clear lens popping out of the holder.

Thanks! Yeah, this one has been one of my biggest animation challenges so far. Frank and Helmut helped with some suggestions for that a few weeks ago. I tried dozens of different approaches to find the best method.

Luckily this is our only interior product line that has an arched face. We have some exterior ones too, but they don't have removable / changeable parts. There are some other products that have flexing inserts, but they start out with a flat face. Technically the paper width should never change, but I fudged it here for the sake of getting the animation done. I pretty much eyeballed and guessed the whole animation part for that. That's one of the reasons the spline shape got fubar and crossed over into the holder.
Here's the website section for that one, if you care to see it: http://www.apcosigns.com/arcadia.html

This one is the third out of a total of five for an interior set, and then I have three animations to do for exterior signs. One of those will be interesting, but fun. They're internally lit by some LED raceways. I'll have to get with one of our engineers to model it, since they don't even have this product on our website yet. I'll have to share the animations in the Gallery section when they're done. The new website is set to launch before the end of December. So I still have a few weeks to sort them all out.

Have a nice night.
Simon
 
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