Maya question - shadows on transparant material

[Herpes Melodie]

Heya everyone,

I was wondering how, and if it even is possible, to bake shadows with a transparant background to create textures such as ground shadows.

I would guess you need to start with a transparant material on a plane?

[Leeza Catteneo]

Hello =)

What I made is to bake out the shadows on a plane with a white material on it that does not reflect any lights. After that I put the baked texture in the alpha channel in photoshop, inverted it and saved it as a tga (32 bit) file. The black areas (grey to black areas) of the alpha channel will make the texture transparent.

[Herpes Melodie]

Heya,

I figured it could be done with Photoshop, but thought it required a lot of tedious work to extract the shadow properly. That is why I was looking for a way to do it in Maya.

But now that you mention it, I forgot that alpha channels work with black and white as well so it should be done within a few clicks - thanks!