Tips and Tricks for White Backgrounds in Blender

Getting rid of that pesky grey border can be a bit of a challenge sometimes, especially if you want to keep the reflections and shadows Blender adds. In this video I outline some tips to help get closer to a presentation-ready, borderless image straight from the render. These tips apply to both Eevee and Cycles.
Note that these tricks have to be modified slightly for each individual scene, so a bit of exploration is required. I personally find a good approach is to go a bit more grey in Blender than you anticipate needing to boost the shadows and then bringing up the highlights and dropping the shadows with compositing in Blender or Photoshop after rendering. If there's enough interest I might do a followup showing this for a few examples.
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[@LDMTX6]

Something else you can do is keep the white surface in your scene but select "Holdout" under Object Properties. This will render the scene as if your white surface is still there but will mask it out of the final render.

[@Al1987ac]

The problem is you'll loose shadow this way. Maybe Shadowcatcher is a better solution: Object Properties>>Visibility>>Shadowcatcher.

[@justinharvie8126]

Man, just that change from Filmic to Standard in the color management for the Render settings made all of the difference. Thanks for the tips!

[@rogerstich7603]

Another Approach is to make the Background Plane a Shadowcatcher (Under Object Properties -> Visibility -> Shadow Catcher) That way you have the best of both worlds. Beeing able to put whatever Background you want while keeping the Shadows.

[@CGFigures]

Just be careful to actually capture the shadows in your camera. I've had instances where I import still frames into powerpoint with shadows that end in very abrupt rectangles.

[@StudiofrogPl]

very useful and informative tutorial. Thanks for your work.

[@thebigr4280]

Amazing thank you so much!

[@vapeurdepisse]

I need an emissive material that does not generate shadows. This way I get the benefit of bringing ambient light into the scene, while keeping unwanted shadows from my ground plane. So far all I could find is to create some kind of wrap around mesh of lights with shadow casting disabled in the lights.

[@CGFigures]

That's an interesting challenge. You could do the classic bounce off the walls route where you just take an area light and shine it against a plane. The light will bounce back into the scene. You can usually get the planes out of the camera view. Derek Elliot has a really good description of this technique in his wine bottle tutorial. Without knowing what your scene looks like it's a bit hard to recommend things. It sounds like this might be a problem best solved by doing some post render compositing.

[@jeffstienstra8700]

\/ SOLUTION FOR SOLID WHITE BACKGROUND WITHOUT POST-PROCESSING (using Cycles) \/ I was able to render just an object and its shadow then composite it over a pure white background. I have my world lighting/HDRI off so only my studio lights affect the object. -be sure your ground plane is set to 'Shadow Catcher' (next to 'Mask' in the Object Properties panel) -go to Compositor view for your scene -ADD the following nodes: -Render Layers (to the left) -Alpha Over (middle) -Composite node, and Viewer node (stacked to the right) -SET the following: -in the Render Layers node: select your scene from the dropdown -in Alpha Over node: set 'Premultiplie' to 1.000, then set the top 'Image' input to white (you can add other nodes as an input here for gradients, images, etc) -CONNECT nodes like so: -Render Layer 'Image' outputs to BOTTOM 'Image' input of Alpha Over -Alpha Over 'Image' outputs to the 'Image' input of the Composite node and the Viewer node -RENDER your scene (F12) When the render completes you should get the rendered output of your scene (your object and its shadow WITHOUT the ground plane) placed on top of a solid white background. Thanks to numerous blender community posts/videos for helping me figure this out!!!!

[@BlastUK]

Best

[@alfonsyoggy4444]

I have many problems when I try to render a metallic object with white background. Any idea?

[@CGFigures]

Metals and glass tend to be the worst for this. Especially if the metals are highly reflective. The pinned comment from T Looch about using the Holdout option for your background in cycles may be your best bet.

[@alfonsyoggy4444]

@@CGFigures thx. I will try that