Hey all!

In Anime, this lack of technology, or man-power, back in the day, led to some very interesting methods for dealing with complex situations. With some clever tinkering, you can use these even in 3D to save you hours of render time!

Enter the Post Tree Shade nodegroups!This set allows you to have shadeless trees in a shot, that run with particles, and add the shadow over whatever you want shaded, afterwards, in the compositor!

They are noise texture and voronoi texture based options, already animated to morph slowly, that gives you all you need to do for great results! Just give it the shadow pass, direction and a mask and you're set!

This tool allows you to use all manner of found footage without messy integration - make sure you save yourself the time! :D

Features:

• Built with Eevee and contains my special NPR shaders where applicable
• Noise texture based - Voronoi texture based (2 node groups)
• Threshold control for shadow coverage
• X and Y axis controls for offset animation
• Option to use the shadow pass to prevent/reduce double shadowing
• Morph Speed Control allows you to control the pace at which the shadows change shape
• Quick Blur controls for a softening effect of the whole image
• Bright spot influence control for the masked objects with the new shadows added

BY FAR one of the coolest tools in the box and I hope it'll be one of your favs too!!

To add to a project:

• Append the nodegroup through File > Append > For Anime Tree Shade voronoi (or noise based) > Nodetree > For Anime - Tree Shade
• Add it to your compositing setup, by going to the Compositor and Add > Groups.
• Connect the shadow pass, mask for the object(s) to get shaded, adjust shadow color/brightness, check animation speed for your specific scene

Note:

• Direction for the shadows has to be animated - only the morphing is already animated.
• Lumberjack not included - he's one of my demo models - hopefully soon to be loaded too. ;)