It depends on what you are using to render and what shadows you have set up. It seems to work for depth map shadows
in maya software straight off, but you have to enable raytracing in the render window if you are using raytraced shadows.
It works in mental ray too but there may be shader and lighting combinations that throw more shit into the fan so to speak.
what are you using?

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Yeh, probably should have mentioned that hey? I'm using mental ray. All I've got in the scene is an area light with raytrace shadows.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

try this.

1) ctrl+a to the channel box, swap to render layers using the radio button.
2) create a new layer, select all your objects and right click the layer>add objects.
3) pick one of the objects>ctrl+a>to the attribute editor
4) select the new layer tab for that object (probably "layer 1".)
5) up the top right hit the presets button and scroll to the shadows preset.

That creates all the settings for a shadow pass, now just batch render with this layer active. and you can swap back to your master layer without effecting anything.
good for setting up occlusion passes aswell.

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By Jove, you've done it again! Thanks Tyson.

Just a note to anyone who might be having similar problems in the future, make sure you don't have the 'use background' shader on any of your objects when using this method. It'll work with your scene materials.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

glad it worked, there are probably millions of quick easy ways to do things hidden in maya like this, probably as many as there are annoying frustrating slow ways aswell huh?.

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They're all frustrating and slow when you don't know what your doing

Speaking of frustrating and slow the renders are taking 4-5 minutes per frame for a shadow pass of a pretty basic scene. That's not normal is it?

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

Yeah, you have a point . What i meant was that maya always seems to have a more cumbersome way to do things than max does, you know like where max has a shader that works (blend material, falloff map, two sided material) you generally have to build a fairly complex network to achieve a similar result in maya. I'd like to see some more artist friendly preset utility shaders like blend material added in some future version (vray for maya has all the vray goodness though I was happy to see). As for the render time on your scene. Its hard to say but that does seem like a long time. all you can do is go through all the settings and find any that are in orange that have changed from your master layer and see if they are at fault. maybe you could swap to maya software for this pass as the shadows should be the same from the area light regardless of the renderer. Feel free to send me the scene for a second opinion if you want. that is if its not got loads of textures and stuff.

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Without me doing anything it sped up to a more respectable time. Might have been the motion blur on the walk over to the filing cabinet that was slowing it down. Thanks anyway.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]