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

Node Compositing

As the Cycles compositing process is almost the same as it was for Blender Render, in this section we’ll focus on the different steps for setting up the shadows. In Figure 14.10, you can see another numbered node tree that shows how the shadows are composited. At the end of this section, Figure 14.11 shows the completed node tree for reference, but once you’ve composited the shadows, the rest of the process is exactly the same as for Blender Render.

1. Set the Render Layers node to show the Floor Shadows Render Layer.

2. Create a Dilate/Erode node from the Filter nodes category and connect the Alpha from the Floor Shadows Render Layer to the Dilate/Erode node’s input. The Dilate/Erode node takes an image (in this case the Alpha ...