[Bf-cycles] Shadow Pass including IBL + mesh Lights (VFX)

[Thomas Beck]

Hi Brecht,

as we are creating a lot VFX for the advertising industry and we're
converting our projects slowly but steadily to Cycles we're now at a point
that bothers me and my colleagues a lot: A proper shadow pass that includes
HDR environment lights and mesh lights.

In our production work flow we're taking light probes on the set whenever
we need to create cg elements afterwards, this way we match the lighting
situation perfectly with the real world conditions.
When we compose those elements into the shot we're used to use the shadow
(& AO) pass (in vray / mental ray) and were a bit surprised as we saw that
we've got no possibility to mimic that behaviour with Cycles and our
lighting requirements as mesh and environment lights are not considered in
cycles shadow pass..

Today I asked DingTo on IRC and he told me that there is a way to take mesh
lights into account by deleting "ls.prim == PRIM_NONE && " in
kernel_emission.h
That is already a big leap forward but does not help us on our light probe
(IBL) work flow...so the question is: Do you know that this is not only a
small missing feature but is really crucial for VFX work? I talked with
Sebastian too and he's also missing it very much - without this, many
projects are very cumbersome to do atm.

I searched a bit and was led to the wiki page where you collect all todos
and especially this:

   - Option to include environment lighting in shadow pass.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.6/Source/Render/Cycles/ToDo

I really don't want to bash here - just raise the awareness of this issue.
It's not only a missing feature, it's really a show stopper for us.

Is that feature hard to implement? Is there any chance you could tackle
this issue in a relatively short amount of time? Should I write Ton and beg
for dev time?

If you'd like to talk just drop me a message @plasmasolutions or g+ and
I'll be online in IRC...

Many greetings, Thomas

P.S: I'm happy that I'm not the only one with this request but I still
wonder why there are not many more? Is Blender rarely used in the VFX
field? https://developer.blender.org/T34272

-- 

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