tomtm

Tser
When I set the render engine to XPU the render takes quite a bit longer than CPU, and I don't think you can get the same effect as a shadow matte (Shadow Catcher) with an environment light hdri, unless this ability is hidden somewhere.

I think it would be essential for later compositing where you load the background footage.
It would be cool to have a ShadowCatcher Material.

I agree that it is essential that Karma needs a Shadow Catcher, Pixar has one with their USD render engine, so it is possible with Karma, I think all current render engines have a Shadow Catcher, you just need it integrated with the Beauty pass, not just in a Shadow pass.

In XPU it gets a lot slower using the bg plate node, and also the glossy reflections feature is not supported from what I've tested. A shadow catcher would be great indeed.

johancc
In XPU it gets a lot slower using the bg plate node, and also the glossy reflections feature is not supported from what I've tested. A shadow catcher would be great indeed.

Ok, happy to see you guys see it also as an essential.
So I will send a feature request :-)

Is it now possible to implement a shadow catcher in 20.5?

I wonder if Copernicus can be used to generate a shadow matte?

Still looking for this solution all over the place.. no luck

Is there a chance that V21 has some form of Shadow Matte Material for catching shadows without involving the Background Plate and the compositor

Any updates on a Shadow Matte Material for H21?

It works just fine!

Thanks Mirko for the heads up, works really well and super easy to setup and thank to the great team at SideFX, well done.

Been testing the Shadow Catcher and it is VERY slow, I have two RTX 5090's and with the Shadow Catcher turned on the render update is agonizingly slow when panning the scene, or have I missed something?

Tser
Thanks Mirko for the heads up, works really well and super easy to setup and thank to the great team at SideFX, well done.

This is good news. I need to experiment with this.

Tser
Been testing the Shadow Catcher and it is VERY slow, I have two RTX 5090's and with the Shadow Catcher turned on the render update is agonizingly slow when panning the scene, or have I missed something?

I have noticed the scene navigation in solaris is much less responsive now with 21 and XPU viewport active. Not only with the shadow catcher.

Funny thing is, if I switch to Karma CPU rendering, not Karma XPU, then the scene panning etc is much more responsive, this doesn't make sense...

There are a few issues with this form of shadow catching in xpu, if you try to pan around the scene, the update takes a long time, even running two 5090 gpu's, also the shadow is not interacting with the object casting the shadow, if you select the option "Blocks Lighting" the render seems to pick up a black area from the background which is in the reflection of the object, maybe this is something to do with the shadow catching plane, also when you try to render to MPlay the shadow matte is not composited in the beauty, I would have thought that you would get the same beauty image which was displayed in the render view and the beauty pass is missing the area where the shadow was, there is a separate beauty and shadow, but you cannot composite them together, I just wish you guys followed the same method that Arnold uses by adding the shadow matte material to the plane, then everything in the scene will know that the shadow exists and react to it by adding it to their reflection/refraction's. I hope you can improve upon what you've started.