Material wrapper shadows are rendering too black

[dre4mer]

Greetings,

I'm trying to use material wrapper as a shadow catcher for a crowd in a stadium. I'd like to be able to render the stadium plate, and a crowd plate with crowd shadows.

I've rendered the stadium backplate.


And the crowd plate with the wrapper settings like this.


The wrapper has a base material set to the stadium material.

If I render the crowd and stadium together they look fine, but if I render crowd and stadium separately and drop them together in after effects the shadows are too black. So it seems like something isn't right with the wrapper material settings?


I'm using linear workflow in vray maya, gamma 2.2 ,affect BG, dont' affect colors. I do NOT have linear workflow checked. And I currently do not have any gamma correction on any materials in the scene so theoretically my textures are to bright at the moment but that shouldn't be causing this issue.

Any assistance would be appreciated!

-Ethan



Additional Comment:
Looking at it on my nice color correction monitor the difference is very noticable. On my cheaper monitor that don't look nearly as different. But regardless they should be identical right?

[tashko.zashev]

Hi,

It would be best to send us your scene file (could be only small part of it) to support@chaosgroup.com and we will check what is going on here. Please prepare two render layers, one for the background and another for the crowd, so we will be able to run a correct test.
Which V-Ray version is this? The latest 3.x beta perhaps ?

[vlado]

Do you use any GI for this? If yes, then the GI environment color will affect the shadow density and you can use this to achieve the desired effect. Or you can directly adjust the matte shadow color.

Best regards,
Vlado

[dre4mer]

I am using GI for this test, but i'm planning to use an HDRI for my real shots so I don't think I could play with that value. By "GI environment color" are you referring to "the GI texture" or do you mean a different setting?

Also, by "matte shadow color" you mean the "shadow tint color" on the wrapper correct? I can play with that to try and get a closer looking result, but isn't there a correct way to get correct shadow density instead of playing with it till it looks right? I'd like to be using a workflow that gives me the beauty pass render as a final result.

[dre4mer]

Alright so based on feedback from support I understand what's going on now. AE doesn't mix the alpha properly from the EXR files. Unless all EXR layers from vray are changed to (no color management) in AE. If it is set this way then the brightness line up and all that is required is an adjustment layer with an exposure gamma set to 2.2 to bring the whole image back to what the beauty render looks like exactly. Works perfectly though kind of annoying AE doesn't work without this workaround.

[tashko.zashev]

Glad to hear that this workflow works as expected now.

About your question from the previous post

Also, by "matte shadow color" you mean the "shadow tint color" on the wrapper correct?

Yes exactly.