I was testing iclone 6 and realised that after importing an avatar or prop into the scene there was no floor shadow like iclone 5. I had to import a ground and set the shadow on it to see it. Why did they remove this option? It was very useful if we wanted to import a background scene without adding any floor. Will they enable it again? It changes a lot of my plans of my future works.

+1

These are all very good questions. I have no answers. I hope somebody will.

I agree that that drop shadow feature was quite useful. I've used it to create a shadow just by itself. It also allowed you to create a shadow for say a character with just a 2D background.

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I hope this option will be back at a next update...I have a serious problem with a movie that I plan to start because I was going to use backround images and videos...

In my ignorance, which is vast, I used to think the floor/wall shadows were sort of odd things to have.  Now that I see value in them, they're gone.

If you wanted to have a null (no) background, and render a character or a prop for compositing in another application, the shadow would be nice to have.

In Indigo Renderer (but not RT, I think), you can have a "shadow catcher" which is essentially an invisible (100% transparent) object with will show shadows that land on it.  You can also render the shadow only, if you wish.

And it would also be useful in the situation doomstepef described.

Can you make your own "shadow catcher" that's a transparent plane (or any prop) that still displays the shadows that land on it?

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Unfortunately not. Once a plane is transparent, you lose the shadow.

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I forgot to experiment with that when I got home yesterday.  I know there is some weird "shadow" stuff where light can pass through walls and you set a counterintuitive setting to fix that, independently of the normal "transparency" value of the wall/prop.  (I posted about that couple times, but don't remember the details.)  I was hoping that might turn into an advantage in this case.

Thanks for the reply, even if was wasn't what we were hoping for.

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ADDED...

I found my old posts on the topic.

• https://forum.reallusion.com/FindPost202740.aspx

That post (#202740) links to two other posts.

That's where I was hoping we could turn a strange (in my opinion) behavior into an advantage.  But probably not.

 .

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

+1 on wanting a ground shadow.
Please fix this in the next update? My current project would benefit from ground shadows. This is so that I can render a PNG sequence and composite on video backgrounds.
Currently I have to generate artificial shadows in After Effects.

The grass in iClone is amazing EXCEPT apparently it won't receive shadows from any avatars or props. I'm just beginning my search for an answer on this one. Without shadows casting on the grass, sections of grass actually reduce the quality of the scene.

the only way you could do it is maybe first render an alpha video of your scene in black and white and use it to texture a plane you lie on the ground skewing in the direction away from your light, with slight transparency to allow the video background to show through.

I just realized this very crucial IC5 feature is gone from IC6.
IC5 used to drop shadow on X/Y plane!

How could this feature be removed?
Especially when the ANCIENT IC4 issues of realtime reflection and shadowless point lights still remain?

Real time shadows are expensive enough in iClone already
People have to resort to NON-REALTIME compositing hacks
just to get MAIN SCENE OBJECT/ ACTOR to look grounded
Yet
Shadow Catching, a most basic compositing trick
Is now gone?
It boggles the mind...

The only justification to remove drop shadow/ shadow catching
is if IClone 6 native real time PBR
Is that happening?

This HAS to be a temporal oversight.

  >>> Indie Generalist modeler-rigger-animator <<< Hardware: AlienWare i7-HK 32G GTX1080 2T-SSDs BenqSW320 Wacom-Intuous 3Dconnexion ||| Software: IC6 Pipeline - CTA3 Pipeline - ATK2 - Indigo ||| Zbrush4R8. Blender 2.79. DazStudio 4.9. Carrara. Poser. Octane.