Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Setting Up Render Layers

Now we come to the tricky part. Place Jim in one layer and the floor in another. In Cycles, it doesn’t matter where the lights are; as long as they’re visible in the scene, they’ll affect all the Render Layers.

Just as you did in Blender Render, create two Render Layers, one for Jim and another for the ground plane (see Figure 14.9). For the floor Render Layer, go to the Passes panel on the Render Layers tab and you’ll see a list of the passes you can enable. Enable the Shadow pass.

Figure 14.9 Render Layers set up in Cycles