Creating a material that catches only shadows

Development Rendering
1

Hi all,

I’ve been searching high and low for this but for some reason I just can’t seem to find exactly what I want or a tutorial that actually works.

I’m to create a shadow catcher that works in real time. I have a floor plain and I just want to be able to make it invisible but still have it capture the shadows from the characters and objects. Ideally I’d like to be able to use this in conjunction with Gaussian splatters and a 3D mesh of the the environment that matches. Is there an easy way to do this. I’ve seen that there are some materials on the market place for $10 but I thought if it was easy enough to create I’d just make one myself.

Any ideas?

Thank in advance,

Peter

2

There are post-process materials available on the forum and the internet that work great if your ground is flat. However, if you have non-flat geometry like I do, Unreal will calculate self-shadows from the mesh, and there’s no way to cancel them.

It looks like this feature might be implemented in UE 5.6:

My last attempt was with Composure. It seemed to be the most promising method, but I didn’t have time to finish my tests as we switched to Blender.