Shadow Catcher or Sky Projection Mapping

[Fletch]

In release 2.14.3 Twilight Render Pro we now have a "shadow catcher" for rendering with spherical sky and making the shadows appear on the ground.

If you want your object to appear to be sitting on your spherical sky image follow these simple steps:

Bonus tip:
In lieu of a simple face, Twilight Pro users can insert an Infinite Plane Object and apply their Sky Projection texture to it.

Limitations: HDR skies.
Setting Sky image to HDR is ok, but for the ground "shadow catcher" or "sky projection" material, using a .jpg version of the sky is suggested.
HDR images can be used as material textures via the Twilight Render material editor, but it is advised to use a .jpg version of the sky image instead. The "intensity" of the texture applied to the ground plane can be adjusted in the Sky Projection material template in the Twilight material editor. Of course a sky can also be a .jpg image with Twilight Render.

skyprojectionmaterialtemplate.png (39.41 KiB) Viewed 9324 times

To convert your HDR sky image, take any HDR image and open in a photo editor that can convert your HDR to simple .jpg before loading that spherical image into the texture applied to your ground plane.

[pbacot]

Looks great! Is there a shadow catcher as well for when you want to use another background in post pro? That would be a translucent shadow image that exports with the rendering?

[JGA]

I missed this post still now - a great feature!