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schumak
11-13-2004, 12:43 AM
Hey folks,

I have a sphere on a plane with a spotlight shining on the sphere with shadows on.

I want the plane to receive sphere's shadow but I want to make the plane invisible, so that when you render, you should see a sphere and it's shadow in environment.

I know in 3DMax there was a Matte/Shadow material that makes the plane invisible and receives shadows.

What i have tried so far in Maya:
1. Applied a Blin material transparency set to 0.
2. I went into the RenderStats of the pPlaneSape1 through the Attribute Editor (CTRL+A) and turned off (unchecked the checkbox, default:checked) "Primary Visibility".

Above options did not work, any suggestions?
swardson
11-13-2004, 12:56 AM
ok you can do two things here.

the first option (which is my preference) is to apply a useBackground Shader to the plane and in its attributes turn reflectivity and specular color all the way down. Render and voila, your shadow is in the alpha channel.

You can also take any shader and apply it to the plane. Then open the attribute editor for that shader and do the following.

open the tab that says Matte Opacity and in the Matte Opacity Mode menu choose Black Hole from the list.

both will do the same thing, but the useBackground shader renders a bit faster.

hope this helps

-Brad
schumak
11-13-2004, 04:06 AM
hey thanks!
The BlackHole didn't work for me, it just showed the plane as solid black color but your "UseBackGroud" technique worked well! Thanks alot :thumbsup:
swardson
11-14-2004, 02:51 AM
no problem...:)

yeah ive had issues with black hole before, thats why I prefer the use Background shader.

Brad
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