Trying to work out if there is a way to fake a shadow pass?

In Element 3D you could turn off a character from view and you could have it just cast its shadow?  you could also create a matte shadow. Is there any way of casting a shadow on surface then making surface transparent but still leaving the shadow?

Im new to iClone. Dont see any work-arounds online.

Thanks

As you may have noticed from the lack of responses, this is unfortunately not possible. It would be a useful feature.

The opposite is possible: an invisible dummy can receive a shadow.

There was a discussion about this years ago, but I don't remember if we came up with a workaround.

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Hi,
Thanks for reply.
I think the only way to do it (again not sure if this is possible?)

make object white.
remove receive shadows
render out with alpha channel

Im seeing you hav 13k post, so defo not new to this.

so.
if i had 1 character walking across plane. i could:
make plane white and character white.
turn off receive shadows on character
render out alpha
bring it into After Effects and turn multiply blend mode. it would only show the black and grey shadow.

But and heres the but!!, can u copy a scene, duplicate it?
It would only work then? 
Ive seen a tutorial on grouping by Attaching it to an object? maybe theres some work arounfd there?

But why do you want to duplicate the entire scene?
You only need to duplicate props which receive a shadow from invisible character.

Render your scene normally (without invisible character, or make it invisible at the timeline where it should be).
Set background to white (in Project settings).
Hide everything except duplicated objects (those which need to have a shadow from invisible character).
Set them as dummy and enable "Receive Shadows" in Dummy section. Those objects became *shadow catchers*. BTW, if there are only few objects, which receive a shadow, then you may choose not to duplicate them. You can always disable a dummy status.
You may want to use Shadow Casters to set shadows as your scene light shadows might not be enough to make is as dark as possible (you may tweak shadow later in in NLE).
For character, which needs to cast a shadow set all materials to PBR or Traditional (not DHS). Select all materials and set opacity to 1.
Render resulted scene normally.

In NLE compose clips and matte out the white for the second rendered clip (method depends on a type of NLE). Threshold should take care of that 1% opaque character.
Tweak further other parameters for shadow layer such as brightness, color, blur... etc.

There made one with this method

Wow, this is good news....
In fact great news!!!!

Unfortunately, i am only in my second week on iClone. I will have to carefully go over your steps once im familiar with the whole setup

Thanks.

Shame u could not put walkthrough vid on youtube... Screen capture what you are doing. Thanks for the info :) 

I thought steps are quite simple. I'll put something together over the weekend.

I use HitFilm as NLE. In your case, second part of the routine might be different.
The Directional Shadow in iClone is added to amplify it, so that there is a room for its manipulation in NLE.

you mean like this ?

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Hi thanks for this my good man.
Ive been thru the lighting and shadows TUTs.

I pushed up the IBL strength and cranked up the shadows. This got rid of that tiny ghosting (must be the 1% on opacity)
Scene>Directional light.............Modify>shadow >unique shadow settings 4096x4096
This gives a rich blk shadow. I can take this out and add a blend mode plus blur effect in After Effects....

Pity there wasnt an option for 0% opacity on an object and just render out the shadow on the transparent shadow caster....

But what a great workaround :)

**cough**
dear reallusion, i wanna speak to the manager!!!!!!!

One more step that will make it just a little better is to set the self illumination of the casting object to 100%.

SoL
Shadow threshold = 0
Opacity =1
Self illumination = 100