Hi everyone, I have a question that should be simple but is driving me crazy…
In this basic example I am rendering a chrome teapot.
With no ground plane, the teapot looks like it is floating.
With a ground plane with a basic material applied to it, the teapot is grounded with a shadow and also the reflection of the plane.
With a shadow material applied to the material, the shadow renders correctly in the alpha channel BUT there is still a reflection in the teapot (Here I made the base material green to better illustrate)
I turn off reflections in the Object properties of the plane and I lose the reflection but ALSO my shadow
How do I get a shadow reflecting back into my teapot, with out seeing the friggin shadow plane itself in my teapot?
I am using a Vray Material as my base material in my shadow material, since that is now a vray 3 thing apparently.
in my vraymtlwrapper I set the alpha contribution to -1, shadows and affect alpha are ON, Matte surface is ON.
This has been bugging me for years… Still don’t have a solution for it. There is an option called “matte for refl/refr”, but most of the time it does more harm then good…
Please take a look at the attached image. If I light the scene with an HDRI, the HDRI somehow gets mapped onto the plane the shadow is cast on. This leaves a visible distortion at the horizon in the reflection. You can clearly see a hard edge there.
Matte for refl in the material properties? This just blacks out the entire reflection of the plane. I don’t want to see the plane at all! Just its shadow
Even Keyshot has this ability. I’m really surprised there isn’t a work around in Vray?.. I would think literally everyone using hdris in Vray would run into this problem?
You can get the shadows only with the help of Falloff texture(Light/Shadow mode) applied into opacity slot of the BaseMTL.
This however is going to work only with direct lights like sun for example, it won’t work for area lights like plane/sphere and etc.
oh nice, I played with opacity maps in the base material but couldn’t get satisfactory results but I also use hdrls almost exclusively so I was trying with a dome light. The opacity map didn’t help until it bled into the shadow itself, otherwise you still saw the plane. its like i need an opacity map that is the baked shadow o.0
A better workaround would be to bake the shadows and use that texture as opacity map instead Falloff texture.
The downside here is that you have to update the baked shadow map each time when the light-setup is changed.
There is no out of the box solution to this, what we we suggest is only workaround.
A few feature request about that has been added into our system - we’ll let you know when we have some updates on that regard.
