Subtitles of the Movie

Many times you'll find when you're rendering things you just simply cannot get those shadows to behave. They're either too light or they're too dark, so what? happens is you wind up adjusting a light power. So you make the lights brighter, then the shadows still don't look right and all the objects are brighter, or you make them darker. So you just have a whole bunch of trouble trying to get the render to look right. What you can do instead is render your shadows separately from the rest of your scene. So as you can see here I'm on my Manual Settings and I have Cast Shadows on; I'll go ahead and turn that off and I'm going to render this scene with zero shadows. And I'll export this image on my Desktop as No Shadows. Then I'm going to go back to my Render Settings and I'm going to do one that's Shadow only. So I have Raytracing and I have Shadow Only. Now I got these settings by clicking Acquire from Auto originally so that everything from the High Quality settings are over here, so I'm going to go and render again and hopefully this time I'll get my shadows. Now sometimes you'll see that it comes out blank like this. That simply means that you probably forgot to turn something on. In this case I'm going to put Cast Shadows back on but I'm also going to say Shadows only and I do that quite often actually. So this time we should be able to get a grayscale of our image with all the Shadow information. Now with this one I'll go ahead and save it again by going to Export and I'll call it Shadows. Alright, now that I have both these guys I'm going to hop over to Photoshop and I'll go to File, Open, and I'll open up both of those guys on my Desktop. I'm going to grab my Move Tool here and let me just go ahead and expand this so we can just focus on Photoshop and what I'm going to do is with my Move Tool I'll grab the shadows and I'm going to put it over this guy here and it's going to drop it into place. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my Layers and on this Layer here I'm going to choose something like Multiply. Now you can see those shadows in this object. Let me go ahead and turn that off. So we have Shadows, No Shadows. Now the reason you might want to do this - let me go ahead and hit F on my keyboard so I can move this over - is so that I can play around with the strength of these shadows. Let's say I want them to be darker. I'll go ahead and duplicate that layer a couple of times. Now look at that. I have dark shadows that look really good. I can also get rid of those layers I created here and on this layer I can go to my Opacity and I can make that shadow as light as I want to. This is complete control and this is why a lot of artists spend all day long sending their renders out in different layers. So they send out an Ambient Occlusion pass, a Shadow pass as we just did here, one with reflections, one with all these other different things on it so that you can bring it into a compositing application or something like Photoshop and rebuild it and you can really have control and tweak things so that you get the render that looks exactly the way you want it to look. This is really helpful for when you're having a hotspot issue, or you're having those shadows that just simply aren't bringing out the object the proper way. So once again, all you have to do is in your Poser scenes, set up your Render to do two things: one with a shadow and one without one and then you can open it up in an image editing application, or a compositing application and get the shadows and the other things to behave the way you want them to.