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I've got a scene that I've motion tracked and it seems to be working well. Then I used "Setup tracking scene" to create a cube layer, then a floor layer that would only exist to act as a shadow catcher. When I render this in Blender Render, such as Blender Guru does in his tutorial video, it looks fine. However, because of what I would like to do with this scene in the future, I would rather use cycles instead of blender render. However, I don't think the nodes are set up right or something because when I render it in Cycles, the floor layer still appears. I would like the floor layer to only act as a shadow catcher AND (this is hard to describe) a layer where anything behind it would not be rendered. So like if I had a cube that stuck through the floor layer, only the part that is in front of it would be shown. I should also note that I have no experience with nodes, so that's probably the problem.

Josh Silveous
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    As long this feature is in development, you can find a nice workaround here. – p2or Oct 04 '16 at 13:28
  • @poor I forgot to mention that I would like the shadow catcher layer to not render in the final result, but it's shadows will. Will this method provide that? – Josh Silveous Oct 04 '16 at 14:06
  • What poor means is there is currently no one-step solution to do what you want. You have to set up a mix of material nodes and compositing solution – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Oct 04 '16 at 14:27
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    related: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/47569/render-shadows-over-a-transparent-background-in-cycles/47989#47989 –  Oct 04 '16 at 17:52

1 Answers1

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This feature is now included.

Select the shadowcatcher object, go to the object properties and check Shadow Catcher under Cycles Settings.

It will render a shadow but mask the object behind it.

shadowcatcher

Leander
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