Correcting shadow quality and creating multi-pass for a shadow layer?

[ethanhberkey]

I have a vfx scene involving  3d characters tracked on top of footage. I have shadow catchers set up in the scene. My first problem is that I want to further modify the shadows only in After Effects after exporting. So ideally I'm looking for a way to export a TIFF sequence of everything but the shadow and then export another TIFF sequence with just the shadows. Then I can combine them in after effects. Is it possible to export 2 sequences at the same time? I have heard of AOVs but those seem like they are more for still images where you can edit a "multi-pass" sequence in photoshop in layers. Is is the same for after effects?

Second problem is you can see the global illumination is casting shadows to the whole surface of the shadow matte disc object. It looks like one big round shadow when rendered. What i want is for the shadow to fade off as it gets further away from the storm trooper. Any help with this is much appreciated. Thanks.

Layers in After EffectsUgly Shadows

[peter_horvath]

Here's a tutorial of a composite workflow, it's Nuke, but should be the same in AE: https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFCUG/Shadow+Matte+AOVs

You can render the scene without shadows and AOV passes in one go, if you set the Opacity in the shadow matte to 0.