Maya Passes Shadow Trouble

[eindoppelganger]

Hey,

did anyone ever experience that the shadows rendered directly into the beauty pass via maya passes do not seem to line up with the shadows of the shadow pass (also via maya passes/render layers/maya software)? The shadow pass itself lines up perfectly with a shadow pass we generated by rendering a "use background"-shader on the object - but when we apply one of these to a colorpass-rendering the light direction of the shadows in the beauty and the one rendered separately seem to different (maybe inverted?)

We're using quite a lot of layered-shaders and a lightgen sphere in the scene - does that possibly lead to issues like that?

Thx a lot in advance for your help guys,

michi.

[joojaa]

Well its one of those things that become apparent whsn you realize the realworld term shadow and the computer tern are different.

For the computer shadow is the part of the object that is in the path of light but occluded by some other object. In reality shadow is that and the part thats behind the object. For a comp application this is off course sufficient because the normals pointing different ways part of the shadow is already factored in the shading calculation.