Transparent shadows from regular ground plane

[guest83783]

Hi guys,

If you render something within a standard environment and you render with transparency you are left with some nice and easy to use transparent shadows.

Is there a way to turn off a surfaces 'solid state' to just leave the shadows behind?

My example is:

I'm rendering a watch and I want the shadows from the arms to be transparent so I can float the arms over different surfaces.  The problem I have is the arms are above the surface of the watch face which isn't near 0,0,0 so if I move the arms and snap to ground the scale changes.

I need something quick and easy so that I'm not going through this process each time.  it would be really great if there was a way to change the watch face to a white material that would receive shadows but ultimately be translucent when opening in Photoshop.

I'm not sure if there is a way to do it at the moment?

Cheers

Andy

[LayC42]

Do mean render out an exr file with alpha and open it in PS with alpha channel?

[Esben Oxholm]

What about changing the watch face material to 'ground'? and the environment color to white (or black)?
Does that do what you are looking for?

You might have to hide all the stuff behind the watch face as it become visible when the material is set to 'ground'.

[guest83783]

That's it!  Selecting the watch face as 'ground' and then clipping everything below the ground is what I wanted.

Man...  I wish I knew about this before.  Like a couple of years before!  I've spent so many hours moving things to the ground plane to achieve things like this.

Thanks for the prompt!

Andy

[Esben Oxholm]

Good to hear!
Glad to help