Help, shadows won’t show up!

[Matthew Krumins]

Is the cone angle of the light big enough to acctually cast a shaddow. i.e is your 3D object placed between the light and the background? if the light is off to the side or something it may be casting a shaddow but out of the camera shot? sounds obvious but it’s all I can think of?

[Karen Stermscheg]

Yeah it’s big enough and the text is between the light and the background. I have never had this problem before.

[Mike Kov]

This might sound like a dumb response but have you tried deleting the old background layer and remaking a new one in it’s place. If it’s not too much work for you?

A few days ago I had some trouble with a video that included 3d layers. Essentially the video showed a book opening it’s cover with a light sort of creating a gloomy mood.
Everything was fine in after effects like i said, but once i had rendered the video and opened it in quicktime, i had this weird problem where the book cover would become 50% transparent (or at least it seemed that way) just before the cover started to open.

I showed it to all the people i knew who had knowledge of after effects and was told that they didn’t know what was up. one guy just suggested deleting and putting the same image back in and it worked completely fine.

Sorry for the long winded tale, just thought that if i gave you an example of it actually working it might seem like a less amateurish response.

Let us know if it made any difference.

[Karen Stermscheg]

I did try that thanks. I finally figured out what it was. I had two layers that I had shy-ed (shied?) and they were trackmatted using the luma key, so it was screwing up shadows for any objects underneath them. When I took the luma track matte off I was able to see shadows.

Thanks for your responses though!