Render without Shadows

[Jeremy Allen]

I think you have 2 options.. Render once with the shadow pass and then render again with no shadows in the scene for your main render. Probably not very efficient unless its a very simple scene that renders quickly.

The other option, and I think the more common technique, is to render enough multi-passes to rebuild the entire scene in After Effects. If you do this, you won’t need to save the main image render at all, only the multi-passes. So you would need to render whatever passes you need to recreate the scene, like ambient, diffuse, reflection, specular, shadow, atmosphere, object buffers, etc. You end up with separate layers in After Effects, combined with different blending modes, to create the entire image. This technique yields much more control over the separate passes and much more flexibility when compositing.

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeff Klein]

Hi Jeremy, thanks for the response. I thought those might be the only options. I was just hoping that there was a check box somewhere to turn off shadows in the main render when also doing a shadow pass. Thanks!

[Adam Trachtenberg]

That’s the right idea but you don’t actually have to render out separate passes for everything. There’s a multipass option called “Blend Channel” that allows you to combine any elements you want into a single pass. So in this case you would just check everything that applies to your render *except* shadows.

[Jeremy Allen]

Well it looks like you were right Jeff, there is a checkbox for that! Sorry for the mis-information, just ignore what I said. I’m still learning C4D and I like to help when I can, but I still have a long way to go before I *really* know what i’m talking about 🙂

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeff Klein]

Great, exactly what I was looking for. Thank you both for all your help!