From the course: Digital Matte Painting: 3 Tone

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts.

Looking at shaped shadows

Looking at shaped shadows

We did two regular cast shadows in the lesson, but now we're going to explore a special kind of cast shadow, a shape shadow. Shape shadows contain the shape of the object that is projecting them, and they are among the most interesting shadows you'll have on a project. An obvious example of a shape shadow would occur where the shadow of this bridge was projected onto the wall behind it. It would contain the pattern of the crenelations on top of the bridge along with the curve on the underside of the bridge. The shadow would show that curve along with the interesting zigzag pattern at the top. If you look at the crenulations at the top of the bridge, they're complicated by the crenulations at the back. The pattern is not clear so I'm going to use the powder of the crenulations from this side wall since they are more clearly defined. I'm going to set my feather back to zero, and lasso around a section of these. And then intersect that with the lower wall mask holding layer. Move that…

Contents