Rendering people with shadows seperately in an archvis animation question

[elivnA]

Hello,

I'm rendering an archvis animation currently, and have a lot of people walking around in there. Now i've rendered the static part of the scene with baked LC/irrmap, and that all works fine. But now I have the problem of putting in people with shadows as a seperate pass, and I'm having some problems with it.

My setup: max2014, vray 2.40.04

vraydomelight + hdri as complete lighting (nothing in environment slots)

Gray vraymtl > vraymtlwrapper put into the mtl override slot in the global switches menu.



Black arch&design material applied to people (from max populate), then excluded from override (the people are just going to be silhouettes with shadow).

My final composited render (with alpha applied on the seperate people pass) looks like this:



The problem i'm having now is, the people who are in the left building's shadow should not have a sharp shadow, but ofcourse they do, since all objects have the vraymtlwrapper applied and are basically all in direct light. How do I get my people to only have sharp (sun) shadows when they are in direct light, and only diffuse shadows for when they are in the building's shadow? Is this unavoidable since I'm using the vraydomelight+hdri?

[Donald2B]

Do you have the buildings in the people scene? It appears that you don't have any geometry creating the shadows as the original render.

[elivnA]

Yea, though these are all overridden by a vraymtlwrapper. Does this mean the mtlwrapper can only receive shadows but not cast them?

[Donald2B]

This is how I do it.

Only the objects grabbing shadows are Matte objects. People are normal, then I select everything else and turn off visible to camera. That way the scene should render exactly as before, especially important for lighting scenarios.

[elivnA]

So that means in this case the floor will be visible in my People pass as well?

[Donald2B]

No, your floor is what is catching the shadows of the people and should be set as a Matte Object, with Alpha at -1.0. Since it is a Matte object it will not be visible in your render. Just make sure to set the alpha to -1.0 on the ground to get a proper alpha.