Motion tracking has never been as easy! The NEW Shadow Catcher Feature and how you can get it!

We're going to talk about the Shadow Catcher new featuer today, and if you do not know what it is, keep reading and you will find out!

First of all, what is shadow catcher? and what is it used for? and when will you need it? When you get to VFX in blender, you're mostly faced with blender compositor, using all the different nodes to mix things up and have the best look, but it's kinda frustrating for begginers to get used to and it's quite complicated, before this new feature, we used to render multiple layers and then get them together in the composition, and it would take a longer time since it renders every single layer at a time, the Ambiant occlusion, the shadows and the object, no more render layers! the new shadow catcher feature allows you to cast shadows only from a plane, for example if we had a cube on a plane that has shadows, of course, and we wanted to hide the plane and keep the shadows only, you can now do it with a single check box! this feature will be offically available in blender version 2.79, but it won't be out now, do not worry! you can try it and start using it now via using the latest stable builds of blender which are daily builds that has latest features, all you have to do to use the feature is download blender daily build from here Grab your daily build! after setting a scene, let's be simple, a plane and a cube would do it for the sake of tests, all you have to do is selecting the plane and going to the object tab, under cycles settings which is at the very buttom, select Shadow Catcher, Shift+Z to preview and boom! there you have it, all you have to do in the compositor now is mix the rendered image with an input movie clip or image using a mix node, and selecting ALPHA and you're done! we'll talk about the compositor more in the next few articles if you're not familiar with it! for now just have fun with this feature!