How to Create Shadow Matte and Occlusion Matte in Maya Arnold | Tutorial

Hi! In this session we are going to talk how to create shadow matte and occlusion matte in Maya Arnold and also how to use them in Nuke!

I will be showing the technique and things to look out of when creating shadow mattes and also things that you do with them in post; in Nuke!

Benefits of shadow matte
allows controls on the look of the shadow/ softness/ color
minimize re-render of passes example; if a environment is for sure done and only the character is going through animation changes, what we can do is render the environment without shadows, then we only need to render character and shadow pass if animation has any new iterations

Things to note when using shadow matte
if your environment has some reflective surface then u will need additional reflection passes to make sure your new animation is reflected correctly in the environment

Good to have
occlusion pass

Bonus tips
Easy way to get all light groups AOVs
instead of custom aovs for all lights, you can add RGBA into aovs then select aov node in the dropdown menu, instead of global lights, choose light groups!

Thank you for watching and if you enjoy the content or want me to do more of such related content or have any questions, please feel free to drop them in the comment section. I will definitely look through all of them and reply them as much as I could!

Again, whatever technique used is solely based on my personal preference, it's by no means saying that this is the 100% right way of doing things and if you have a better approach, please do share it with me too!

Thank you!