Hi all. I may have missed something obvious, but does anyone know the workflow for casting shadows onto geometry in KMY? The only tutorial I can find on the subject is for KMX, found here:
thinkboxsoftware.com/krak-sh … -geometry/
In Maya, I don’t see any options in the render globals for outputting shadow maps that I could then pipe into Vray. I checked to see if maya lights could have custom Krakatoa attributes added, but no luck there. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Dan
Hi Dan,
Unfortunately, Krakatoa MY currently does not support this due to a severe limitation of the Maya API.
We contacted Autodesk about this, but could not get any solution from them.
We are in a similar situation with Krakatoa C4D and have informed MAXON about the limitation.
We had an ugly hack to get something working with a specific build of V-Ray or mental ray, but it was not worth including in a commercial release of Krakatoa MY.
Some Krakatoa C4D users were able to fake shadows on geometry to a certain extent by rendering a black particles on white background image sequence from the light’s POV (using a Spot light), then projecting that image sequence onto the scene in the geometry renderer. Of course, this only works in some simple cases. I don’t know if this would be possible in Maya, but you could try.
Thanks much for quick response. Side note off-topic, your KMY webinars are really awesome, they were really helpful in getting up to speed with more advanced functionality in magma.
It’s really unfortunate that casting shadows on geometry isn’t currently supported, I’d read in this press release about KMY 2.3 that it was:
news.creativecow.net/story/873966
“Advanced Shadowing: Cast shadows from Krakatoa particles onto geometry in 3rd party renderers, including Chaos Group’s V-Ray and NVIDIA’s mental ray®.”
As we are currently using KMY in production on a feature, we’ve had to whip up a quick-and-dirty fix where we run a single seed as a standard maya nparticle cache to use in Vray as a shadow caster. This gets us fairly patchy, low-density shadows that require lots of post-processing to look acceptable.
Please keep us posted if there are any developments on this feature, I’d be happy to help out with any testing or feedback!