Drop shadow on surface in Action

Flame Flame Questions
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1

Hey all. I’m creating a photo stack where photos appear in stack one after another, some a bit rotated, some not, etc.

The client wants a soft drop shadow for each photo as if they are laid on a table or something.

I’m using Action to bring them all in and they are all individual surfaces with their own Axes where I rotate them, scale down etc.

How can I quickly and easily make a drop shadow for each corresponding surface?

I found a Shadow node that can be connected to each surface and it would have worked fine if only it allowed me to soften it.

For some reason it only softens the X axis but when I want to soften the Y axis nothing is happening. This ends up with my shadow nice and soft to the right of photo but hard edge on the bottom of the photo.

Does anyone know:

  • why I can’t soften it on the Y axis - it seems to be limited to the edge of the surface and can’t go beyond it?? Does it work for anyone else?

  • any other quick way for each surface to cast a soft drop shadow „on the table" style

  • or maybe approach it differently altogether?

I’m still quite new to flame so apologies if I don’t understand some of the terms etc.

Thank you!

2

Things will get funky if you are using image surfaces to their border. Things like Blurs will hit the hard edge and not go beyond, so it could be that. I tend to scale any full-frame objects down to 90% via 2d transform (which also outputs a proper matte, even if you don’t feed one in) to allow some flex for blurs and other edge-adjacent shenanigans inside of Action.

3

There’s also a “Shadow Cast” node in action that you attach to a light. It’s not perfect and has a lot of quirks but you can get soft subtle shadows this way as well.

4

No shadows. Turn on ambient occlusion in the output options.