Cast Shadows from CG into a Live Action Scene with Cinema 4D

on Aug 20th 2009 with 22 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Software: Maxon Cinema 4D
  • Difficulty: Intermediate
  • Estimated Completion Time: 1 Hour

Casting realistic looking shadows from a cg object is extremely critical to making your cg believable in a live action environment. It is, however, also extremely difficult. In this tutorial you will learn how to use Cinema 4d to make a shadow catching layer that you will then be able to composite together with the main rendered video in After Effects.

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By

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

My name is Connor Kerrigan, and I am an aspiring visual effects artist in south Florida. I first got into VFX with some 2d effects using after effects, i have sincebroadened my abilities to include 3d tracking, 3d design, and motion graphics work. I love making people see the unbelievable in a very believable way!  

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  • http://www.couperdesigns.com/ steven couper

    Not bad, but they are still better tuts to be had!

    But still good

  • Bob

    This is exactly what i was looking for thank you so much for that :D
    you sound very young though, 15? Its good to see young people getting into the field like this, and making a few bucks too haha
    good job and nice technique

  • John Doe

    I was trying to figure out a way to do this the other day. I was using Boujou and was trying to see if i could eliminate the steps I would have to take to make the shadow in AE. This would have been a great 2 part tutorials if you made a camera track in a tracking program then the export to Cinema with the drop shadow. Thanks though. This is useful info.

    • John Doe

      I should have watched the tut before I commented.
      Pretty cool but would be cool if you could see how everything looks in C4D
      Before you take into AE. Cool tut though. I never really used the sky for reflections I always went old school and made the dome myself. That was a good tip. Thanks for the tut.

  • Jesper

    With such a short tut, you would think that there was a possability of including the camera tracking part of it. But no.
    Can we please have a real 3D cameratracking tut? :)

  • Franco

    Just a technical comment. The best solution to get rid of the black rim around the logo is to render with Straight Alpha. It does make a difference.

    • Will Summers

      If you go to interpret footage by right clicking on the footage in the project window and set your footage to premultiplied on black it will get rid of the black fringe.

      I dislike rendering with Straight Alpha since quicktime doesn’t interpret it correctly.

  • kambiz

    please let us to downlod thease gret tutorials on your site.
    Like AETuts plz send the FLV adress for download

    thanks CGtuts Modrators

    • 2mnyshp

      firefox + DownloadHelper = win

      • kambiz

        thx man :)

  • kambiz

    how we can download thease tutorials?
    plz help me

  • 2mnyshp

    one question: why didnt you do the shadow directly in C4d?

  • illd

    Nice Tutorial! But what if the floor had an uneven surface?

    • 2mnyshp

      how i would to it: model the ground directly in c4d and place it under the text. now on the render tag only click “receive shadows” so its invisible in the render.

  • http://3dimentional.wordpress.com Cesar Mujica Castro

    I needed this tutorial two months ago.

    • ed

      same here

  • listen

    why i can’t see the vedio ? TT

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  • daniel

    the whole thing looked great until you color corrected it lol

    thanks for the tut though :)

  • syd

    Thanks so much man!!! I was about to through my computer across the room until I stumbled over this! This helped so much you have no idea!

  • ming

    Nice !! Thanks and keep it up ~ :)

  • Bilal

    Hi, for some reason or other using a video texture has never worked for me please shed light on this issue