Hi ,
so unfortunately this thread stops at an interesting point. I also need a shadow catcher/matte material for compositing a car in front of a backplate (I use the new Image-Plate plugin for that). Without a shadowplane the car is just floating…
The new Composure plugin shows the effect I am looking for, but i don’t understand the BP and code good enough without documentation to rebuild the effect for my application at runtime (without Composure).
I was able to get a result with the Shadowplane Material from the Augmented Unreality plugin: GitHub - adynathos/AugmentedUnreality: Augmented reality for Unreal Engine 4
Unfortunately the material needs to be “Lit” to show shadows, so it gets brighter/darker than the backplate because of the directional light. So dead-end here…
I tried your “Custom Per Object Shadowmaps using Blueprints” Tutorial (great work! Thx for that!), and with some tweaks I got some kind of a result.
As far as I understand the workflow (its always hard to figure things out just from BPs), you’re making a Rendertarget from the Light point of view with orthographic projection. This Rendertarget is used in the ShadowPreview material and should masked somehow out the MeshComponent (Plane for me) that the Material is assigned to?
Tweaks:
- I switched the Scene Capture Source to “SceneDepth in R”
- The ShadowPreview Material is “Translucent” and “Unlit”
- The Value from last Clamp goes into “Opacity”, a “Multiply” with a parameter sits between to fade the Shadow.
Results:
Questions:
- As you mentioned, it would be nice to have the possibility to blur the shadows, do you have by now come to any solution for that? (the shadows are really crisp, the Results above are made with a RenderTarget Resolution of 2048x2048, but this seems memory wise to be an overkill…?)
2.The Render Target is dynamic for the directional light (“Capture on movement”), but not for the movements of the shadow casting objects (Cube and Sphere)… “Capture every Frame” is not helping here, for now i have to use the “Set Material” function through “Show Preview Material” unchecking/checking.
So what would be a more efficient way for working with dynamic objects?
This thread is 1 1/2 years old, nevertheless i hope to hear from you. The tweaked tutorial is the best solution i got so far from my investigation…But maybe you or Corentin3D came to a complete other solution…
Greetings
Sebastian