Compositing problem....

[hard8]

I have a scene with an object that is going to be composited over live action.
I have an object that is catching the shadow of the object.

The light is an area light creating a soft shadow.

The problem I am having is whenever I render it out
and pull it into After Effects, the shadow is gone.

I need the shadow catcher to be invisible, but I need the shadows to come out in the alpha.

I could swear I've done this before.

[CC Rider]

Sounds to me like you may need to composite in LW in order to get your object to cast shadows on your plate footage.
(I think that's what you're trying to do...)
I very well could be wrong on this and I'm sure it will get rectified quickly if that's the case, but I don't believe LW will render out the shadow cast from your object out in to empty 3d space for you to import into AE.

The compositor built in to LW is pretty powerful...check out Proton's tutorial on compositing ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Comp.mov
and here is the page with the rest of the tutorials...
http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/training.php?t=77002
Hope this helps!

:jam:

[Lightwolf]

Why an invisible shadow catcher? Make it black and turn the alpha to be the shadow density (surface properties)... and render on black.

Cheers,
Mike