Shader Family: Surface Material
Often you want to include synthetic objects into an existing photographic background plate filled with real world objects. For example, adding a yet-to-be-constructed building into an empty lot, adding a virtual car onto a road, or having a virtual character walk through a scene and realistically interact with objects in the real world scene. In general, the term "synthetic" refers to additional objects to be inserted in the scene, and "real world" refers to objects that are already there.
Two main shaders exist to facilitate this work: the Camera Map (mip_Camera_Map) shader which "projects" an image from the camera onto geometry, and the Matte Shadow (mip_Matte_Shadow) shader which takes care of generating hold-out mattes, as well as allowing the real world objects in the photographic plate to both cast and receive shadows, as well as receive reflections and indirect light.
The Matte Shadow shader is used to create "matte objects" (objects that are used to represent existing real world objects in a photographic plate) for the following purposes:
Blocking another synthetic object from the camera's view (to allow the synthetic objects to go behind the real world object).
Allowing synthetic objects to cast shadows, occlude, and receive shadows from the real world objects.
Adding reflections of synthetic objects onto real world objects.
Allowing the interplay of indirect light between synthetic and real world objects.
In all the above mentioned cases, the Matte Shadow shader is applied to an object representing the real world object, and the synthetic object uses a traditional material.
This shader can also function as a "shadows only" shader which only shows how much in shadow a point is compared to the incoming light, but ignoring the actual amount of incoming light itself (only the occluded percentage of it).
Catch |
Enables the use of illuminators to light the scene. |
Illuminators |
Specifies the lights listed as illuminators which are tested and used to actually light the scene. The difference between lights and illuminators is that the lights are only used to cause shadows on the background, whereas the illuminators are used to throw actual light on it. This means that the lights list should contain lights that are already present in the background plate, and the illuminators list contains any additional lights introduced by a CG element, such as the headlights of a CG car. For more information, see Using Light Lists [Direct Illumination]. |
The Matte Shadow shader has multiple outputs. All outputs are as "raw" as possible to be maximally useful as layers in post production. For example, to ensure that the reflections have not been multiplied with the reflection color, and so on.
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