What’s New?

We’ve expanded the Shadow Catcher feature to make it easier to ground subjects in your scene. Shadow Catchers are now customizable, with new controls for adjusting a shadow’s properties and support for custom shadow catcher meshes.

Expanded Settings

Here’s a list of the new Shadow Catcher settings you can expect to see from Toolbag 4.04 onwards.

  • Fade Radius and Falloff sliders allow you to fine-tune how the shadow catcher blends into the background.

  • Indirect Shadow (Ray Tracing only) allows Shadow Catchers to catch reflections and bounced lighting.

  • Roughness slider controls how glossy or matte the shadow area is.

  • Roughness Map is a texture input to create variation in the reflections.

  • Specular Intensity and Fresnel control the intensity of the reflections.

  • Specular Map slot allows you to control reflectivity with a texture input.

Custom Mesh Support

Shadow Catchers now work with custom mesh objects by simply dragging a mesh onto the Shadow Catcher. This image shows a street curb mesh parented to a Shadow Catcher object with Indirect Shadow enabled.

Shadow Catcher In Action

In the first slide, we see Indirect Shadow enabled with a Roughness value of 0.1. This creates an almost crystal clear reflection of our prop. This could be especially interesting to use for product visualization renders. 

The second slide shows a value of 0.5 gives a wet look effect that enhances believability by integrating the prop with the cobblestone street. A roughness map is applied to add some variation to the shadow’s roughness.  

The final slide demonstrates a Roughness value of 0.8, producing a subtle yet effective shadow.

Thanks for reading! For more tutorials and quick guides, check out the Resources section of our site, and follow along with a 30-day free trial license of Marmoset Toolbag.