Shadow on Geometry?

Deprecated Krakatoa 1.0 Beta Discussion
1

I have issues casting shadows from krak on geometry :frowning: my scene has one spotlight with shadow map turned on. In the krak GUI i activated “Save Attenuation Maps when rendering” and i have added the geometry to the “Matte Objects Named Selection Sets”. then i set a path in the “Krakatoa Shadow Utility” and click “ADD KRAKATOA SHADOWS TO THE SCENE”. But i get no shadow on the geometry at all…every object casts a nice shadow on krak but krak itself doesn´t seem to do.



i guess i simply do something seriously wrong…i beg for advise :smiley:



kind regards



anselm

2

We should have posted some docs, but this is still WIP.



Here is the workflow step by step.


  1. Create particles, add shadow-casting spotlight(s), add matte objects
  2. Enable Attenuation Map Saving
  3. Set image output path and render.



    At this point, you should have the Krakatoa frames plus a sub-folder \Shadows containing the attenuation maps.


  4. Open the Shadows Utility.
  5. CHANGE THE RENDERER! (to Scanline, Brazil, VRay, Mental Ray…) - there are tools to change the renderer by class or by loading a Max Render Preset.
  6. Pick the path where the shadows were saved to.
  7. Press the button - this should add a projection map to each light in the scene based on its name, matching the file names in the Shadows directory
  8. Set a new save path in the Render Scene Dialog.
  9. Render in your renderer of choice (but not Krakatoa!).



    Result: You should get frames where there are no Krakatoa particles in the scene but the geometry renders AND the lights are projecting the attenuation maps onto the scene. The combination of the Shadow Map shadow casting and the attenuation map in the Projector slot should produce a scene that has shadows cast from (non-visible) Krakatoa Particles onto geometry and from geometry onto geometry.



    Now load both frames in some Post application and comp the particles on top of the Scanline or whatever rendering - the particles will appear to be casting shadows onto the rest of the scene.



    We know this is rather convoluted, but we cannot render anything but Particles, so we had to somehow get Krakatoa info into regular 3rd party renderers.



    You can press the Restore Krakatoa Renderer button if you want to switch the scene back from the current renderer. (we save/load a Max Render Preset to do this, you can save two versions of the scene if you prefer to have Krakatoa and your other Renderer separated).



    Please let me know if this works for you.



    Cheers,



    Borislav “Bobo” Petrov

    Technical Director 3D VFX

    Frantic Films Winnipeg


3

works like a charme :slight_smile: thanks bobo!



seems like i messed something up when set up my scene…working after your step by step tutorial works just fine.



i saved your post into my personal krakatoa tutorial folder :slight_smile: i collect good entries here in the forum and save them into a separate word document. so i have the official kraka docu and my “krakatoa community”-edition :smiley:

kind regards



anselm