How many times you needed a separated flat shadow while you are working on your design to make it look more realistic? How many times you wanted to extract a shadow from a real object and you didn’t succeed? Shadows are hard to manipulate, because they aren’t solid! Here, we have the solution! We made 100% transparent shadows, with Ambient occlusion added to facilitate your work. Whether you are a designer, cartoon artist, visual effects artist, compositor or even a 3D artist, and you need to add a shadow to your scene, they are for you and easy to use, they contain everything you need to create a realistic look for your project.
Images were originally rendered at 2000×2000 pixels with 16-bit depth per channel to prevent banding, they were cropped to reduce the file size and to fit the content ratio. shadows were captured from different angles @ 25°, 45° and from top in multiple directions; then, we saved two versions of shadow from the same object, one is Hard shadow used in sunny scenes and the other is soft shadow used in cloudy scenes, they are excellent for use in 2D and 3D projects, plus they are noiseless.
Choose which shadow suits your design and apply it to the object, then just use any deformer tool like the “Transform” tool in Photoshop or the “Corner Pin” effect in After Effects, or the equivalent in any other software to deform the shadow. (Video tutorials are attached).
N.B: You can mix between hard and soft shadow as you like, this is depending on the light conditions of your scene.
Finally, shadow is shadow and will never change.
Kindly find below links on where and how to use those shadows:
Adobe After Effects tutorials:
Tutorial 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD_z2RFUjb0
Tutorial 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rbJ6y9EZNQ
Adobe Photoshop tutorials:
Tutorial 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNoA0GdqJ6s
Tutorial 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4HVW81nbl0