Just wondering… has there been any progress regarding this issue?
Nope, and I doubt there will be any enhancement before 2.80, will see after the release, I hope this gets fixed too, since the actual shadow catcher is kind of working in a non-useful way, not being enough to work with it.
Cheers.
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Thank you for the reply 
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I made this video to explain how to create your own shadow catcher in Blender using view/render layers and the compositor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgs5JGy2qIU&feature=youtu.be
It also does reflections etc.
The problem with that approach is that you have to multiply your render time by X number of render layers… that’s not good and it’s not a solution 
We need a fixed Shadow Catcher with proper light/reflection capture 
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I agree that it still needs to be fixed and that tripling your render times isn’t great. It’s really just a work around so I don’t have to abandon Blender for this type of stuff (because Blender is great in pretty much every other regard). Also, since GPU acceleration scales really well it’s pretty easy to add extra power (I cut my render time by more than 3x by going from GTX 660 to 2x GTX 970, even though it was only a 220 euro investment).
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Yes, this is if your scene don’t need 26Gb of ram as our usual scenes
When you have to do an animation with 25 minutes per frame in a TR-2990WX to need the render x3 is not a good idea hehehe
Also in the case the render time is deeply affected by pre-load times (4 to 7 minutes depending on the scene) adding those GPU’s don’t solve the problem either
The performance itself is not that much of an issue. Main two issues are:
- Setup time. Your setup wastes ridiculous amount of artists’ time.
- Quality. You are doing so many things wrong with your setup. More than you can even imagine. It will fail in many scenarios, such as strong directional light source from HDRI with colored shadows, and so on.
Proper shadowcatcher is a lot more complicated than your primitive workaround. More on that in this thread: https://blenderartists.org/t/cycles-experiment-with-shadow-catcher/673391/83?u=rawalanche
That is probably because I’m actually a noob when it comes to this stuff. I’ve only been using Blender for a couple of months and I don’t have much vfx experience in general.
That being said, I’d love to see better solutions, I just haven’t found any that worked. I’ve been digging for a while now and this is simply the best I can come up with right now without leaving Blender/Cycles.
It may be broken and won’t work in a lot of situations but it’s better than not having shadows whatsoever (which I’ve actually considered, just shooting everything from above the feet and keeping all my objects away from walls and such).
I’ve had the same issue with OpenEXR btw where my results are half-way there and workable but something slightly fishy is going on and it doesn’t look 100% but I can get away with it. Getting away with it still beats having to abandon my project.
But with the actual shadow catcher you have shadows… it’s not good enough, it lacks a lot of things to be actually really suitable for production, but you have shadows with it (black shadows but shadows)
My “solution” has shadows, AO and reflections. At least, that’s what it looked like to me. You just can’t see them in the demo video. I tried it out with a red cube and a stronger hdri and there was clearly a red reflection on the floor. As far as I know the stock one only has direct shadows.
Yes, so maybe it’d be a good idea to hold off derailing the thread for the time being. This thread is not about asking for workarounds. We all know there are some, but they all come with compromises. The thread is about actually fixing shadowcatcher, getting a fully working, proper solution usable in AAA movie production.
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Hit another brick wall on 2.79 daily build from Jul 15, 2019: Shadow catcher is broken. Use an HDRI environment and make a plane, check shadow catcher. Place a monkey using principled with metalness to 100% over the shadow catcher plane. Shadow catcher looks marvelously on viewport preview, paints a black blotch on render (I´m using 512+ samples).
you are a lucky man
linux 2.79+ daily build hash is same from last month, no new fix or other
Please report bugs in the tracker.
I find it interesting how the shadow catcher reflects shadows of other objects (but not diffuse) if it has a glossy material, there has to be some implementation there to make it work.
Hiding the world/environment from glossy feels like it’s in the right direction, but it just appears as black in reflections instead of transparent.
Blender could finally be used for proper VFX.
Here is the best implementation of this functionality that I’ve seen in any renderer:
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3214746
If you don’t have access via ACM membership, you could try asking Steve or Daniel nicely.
cheers
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So, isn’t been a year. Any news? A shadow catcher is a must for any serious CG software and as much as I love Blender, there’s not much I can do with it with a shadow catcher that doesn’t even work for reflections.
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Well, 2.80 has been just released and many patches are under review for 2.81, there is no Shadow Catcher improvement task I think.
@brecht what do you think about having it as a yellow or green point in the section you consider?
Just so this is not forgotten because right now it’s true that it lacks a lot of feature and the shadows are like semi-transparent masks without any gradient ro colour from the bounces or the environment, the look unnatural.
It also lacks a proper way os catching reflections and other features that were mentioned in this thread for sure.
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Yes please, could we get it in the section as a green point? I’m guessing it’s super low priority right now, but it’s such an important feature for vfx work (i’m just a 3d student on a crusade to use blender for everything, i wish i knew how to code to help you guys, I’m slowly learning on my spare time).
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