Darby, about that shadow...
by Bloopie
on
Jun 24, 2007 at 10:54:42 am
I did what you said about making a new white solid to behave as a shadow catcher and copying the position properties from the layer I want to cast shadow into it, then rotating it on the X Rotation by 90.
It worked very well on this layer I used it on except for 2 things...
1. the layer is an animation of an explosion going high in the air and the shadow catcher layer gets cut at some point unless I scale it astronomically, which makes the composition very very slow.
2. I have two other layers flying around landing at different spots, and their shadow is wrong because they're not on the same line as the explosion layer... I tried duplicating the shadow catcher and adjusting it for those layers as well but then I have 3 huge solid layers (10,000+, 7000+) and this makes my composition virtually impossible to work with. There's also the problem that duplicating the shadow catcher duplicates the shadows instead of adding more ground to work with so I will have to do a very tedious masking job.
Do you have an idea of what I can do to make such a composition work?
Re: Darby, about that shadow... by Darby Edelen on Jun 24, 2007 at 8:01:07 pm
Your solution will probably vary wildly depending on the specifics of your project. I can't give you a definitive solution because I don't know what the 2 layers flying around are (or what they're supposed to represent... debris? airplanes? butterflies?).
The limitation of using a solid to catch shadows, as you've quickly noticed, is that the shadow will only appear in the bounds of the solid. Usually the way to work around this is to either A) Increase the solid size B) Move the solid so that it follows where the shadow lands C) Move the light so that the shadow falls on a smaller area.
If you have your AEP available I can take a look at it and give you some more suggestions.
Darby Edelen DVD Menu Artist Left Coast Digital Aptos, CA
