Corona Matte Material for interior rendering

[smitsfrul]

Hello,

So we are rendering out furniture and interior for a visual configurator, meaning that e.g a livingroom can change furnitures, carpets etc. So we want to render out the furniture with a matte floor to catch the shadows but cant find a way to do this properly. In vray, scanline etc there is a matte material which catches all shadows, and afaik the shadow catcher in corona only works with enviroments meaning we would need to render out the interior as a hdri map and re-apply it which would mean 4x the workload to do this for different houses, different rooms etc.

Is there a similar way to do this in Corona to just apply a matte/shadow map to an interior floor and isolate a sofa e.g and the render would only contain the sofa and the shadows on the floor with the correct alpha channel?

Any help is greatly greatly appriciated!

-e

[GeorgeK]

Hi Smitsfrul,

For this type of scenario in the past I've used a different method entirely, although the shadow-catcher is not a bad one. But in my case it wasn't an option since the floor was reflective/glossy and the furniture really colorful, meaning the bouncing of colors should be all over the room template we had. Also we wanted to keep the lighting of the scene and avoid making HDRI's as you've mentioned.

Possible solutions to your issue:

- If your scene uses a static camera setup in a 3d scene, then simply render the selected affected objects. ( you will save time, in our case the things that changed due to color bleed and reflection was only the floor, the furniture we wanted to present and lastly the back wall.)

- You might only need to render the floor, your object and any neighboring items that affect the lighting or shadows of your final scene.

These method helped us control things better, since we also had animations at the end of the project. If you believe this can help you and you need more information please tell me.

[maru]

afaik the shadow catcher in corona only works with enviroments

This is not true. Did you find such information somewhere online?

Is there a similar way to do this in Corona to just apply a matte/shadow map to an interior floor and isolate a sofa e.g and the render would only contain the sofa and the shadows on the floor with the correct alpha channel?

This is exactly what the shadowcatcher material is made for. See all parts of this video: