There is another trick that already worked in iClone5:


f you set the Opacity slider to 1:


the figur (or object) disappears, but the shadow stays:

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Hey thanks i'll try this :D

There are no render passes in iclone. I think shadows are really important. I was hoping to find a hack where you can cast a shadow on either a shadow catcher or white background
I was thinking if you could duplicate whole scene and make:
scene A: normal textured layer (this would be standard render)
Scene B: EXACT as scene A, but make all textures white. set to cast shadow only or receive shadow.
Just wondering if theres a workaround?

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

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!!!!!!!

you mean like this ?

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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.

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

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 :) 

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