The amazing disappearing shadow catcher

agent_537

I've been trying to get a ground plane to act as a shadow catcher  (Rendering in Iray).   I've followed the nice quick tutorial on youtube, and finally got it to work doing the following steps:

1) Create plane, position plane under characters where the shadows should appear according to the lighing setup.

2)Selected its surface (default) in the surface panel, go over to the content library panel and double-clicked scripts->utilities->Create Advanced Iray Node

3)In the display parameters, set Enable Iray Matte to yes

4) Go back to the surface and change the difuse and ambient colors to black and the lighting method to 'Matte'

5) great success!  shadow catcher working.    

So i started working on other parts of my scene.   Added another character and some props and added a 2D background image to the environment panel

Then i noticed that my shadows on the catcher had disappeared in both the Iray viewport mode and when it renders.  The plane is set to visible and everything looks like it is set up right, but no shadows.  The shader settings all look correct too. I've tried everything i can think of to get them back but with no luck.  

So then i tried creating a new plane primative and doing all the steps again.   The shadows are being cast onto the new plane and it is working just fine.  But I really want to know what happened to mess up my original shadow catcher.   Then things got even more weird.  On the original plane i tried setting Enable Iray Matte back to no and set the difuse colors to a bright color, shined a big 10k lumen light right at the plane, but the darn thing refuses to catch any light.   Opacity is at 100%.. Difuse 100%  All the different lighting modes (Plastic,Metalic,Skin,Glossy)..    i've tried multple shaders from the presets, nothing is working to bring the plane back from the nether.   I've tried switching Render Environs (dome, sun/sky, hdri map),  I've removed and reapplied the background image,   I've tried closing down Daz Studio and re loading the scene, nothing has worked.    . I just tried rendering in 3Delight..  it is invisible there as well.  It is visible in the viewport in all modes except Iray view.   I've been at this for over an hour now, sure I could've just deleted the object and went with the newly created plane that was working fine, but I feel I must figure out what/why this happened to this poor object.    Any experts here know what might have happened?

agent_537

SOLVED!   The object is now back to normal.   It was fixed using  Edit->Object->Zero->Selected Item Pose

I seem to have misclicked and accidently set the Y scale of the plane to 0.0%   I was probably trying to set it to ground level 0, but didnt realize i was adjusting the scale slider instead of translation.

Even though the plane should technically not have any business in the Y axis, setting the Y scaling to 0% will make it invisible to the rendering engines (but not the viewports).

 

 

 

fastbike1

You didn't have to do any of that. If you definitely want a primitive plane all you need to do is create it, select the surface, and add a shader. No messing with any shader settings

OR go Rendersettings>Environment> Draw Ground plane>On.