Hi there,

Is there a way in Houdini 8.1 to render deep shadows from the camera perspective? There are the -z and -Z flags to Mantra to render regular zdepth shadows but is there an easy way to render Deep Shadows from the Camera view? (Prman allows this from the AOV tab)

Any tricks? A quick way to stuff commands into the IFD perhaps? in the Camera pre/post include scripts maybe?

This just to avoid putting a Light duplicating the view with Autogenerate set on. If there is no other way, amen.

Thanks,
Jason

Yes, it will be very useful to be able to render deep shadows from camera as deep raster. With deep shadows from camera, they can be used as holdouts as well.

This extends to rendering deep shadows with a ROP in general. If we can render deep shadows from camera, it will allow us to specify a light as the camera & run the ROP to write out a sequence, rather than trying to remember to toggle the Auto-generate Depth Map switch on a light(s). I know we can do this now by turning off Generate Final Image in the Mantra ROP but it's not as intuitive. Plus, two toggles that we don't have to worry about.

Cheers!
steven