Shadows In 3ds Max

[Bentley Squeegee]

Hello there, Now I have been experimenting time and time again with this one and always ended up creating one in photoshop, Now I am baffled and I am wondering if its actually possible to do so.

Basically what I want to render out is a drop shadow for a chair that I am making, I have baked all of its shadow maps ect, but I am clueless on how to get a shadow map on a ground plane that has an alpha background like I see with so many other builds.

I want to be able to include it in the UVW map for the base of my object, this is working fine with the shadow maps and textures for the base of the chair itself but the ground plane is still pure white with the shadows ontop. I am guessing there is a simple click of a button or a slight adjustment to a material property but I am non the wiser after playing with it for hours.

I do hope someone can help me out with this.

 

Best regards and Thanks for taking your time to read

Bentley

[Masami Kuramoto]

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Bentley Squeegee wrote:

I want to be able to include it in the UVW map for the base of my object, this is working fine with the shadow maps and textures for the base of the chair itself but the ground plane is still pure white with the shadows ontop. I am guessing there is a simple click of a button or a slight adjustment to a material property but I am non the wiser after playing with it for hours.

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I don't know where it is in 3ds Max, but in Blender it is indeed a material property that allows shadows to modify the material's transparency. Of course in order to bake the effect to a texture, the target bitmap must include an alpha channel.

Maybe that helps you figure it out.

[Bentley Squeegee]

Thanks for the help, I played around with opacity but to no avail, hopefully someone on these forums is proficient in max and knows exactly where to find the button of kindness

[Tomos Halsey]

What you want to do is first select the plane, then select Rendering from the top, click Render to Texture and then click "add" in the Outputs window and select ShadowsMap. This should allow you to bake a transparent shadow map onto the plane. I use it for overlaying shadows on camera tracking CGI backdrops

--11 years 3dsMax CGI/Game modeler

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

You can bake a black/white shadow map. Use a pure white plane and use black shadows in 3ds Max.

Then take the result into photoshop, invert the colours and paste it into the alpha channel.

I use a pure white plane for the texture (RGB), that way you can give the shadow any colour you want in SL.