I have been trying to get a character’s shadow on a matte/shadow material on a plane, but I can only seem to do it when I use the Mental Ray lights.  I wouldn’t mind using them, but it’s a ten second animation and it takes a minute and a half for each frame and I can’t wait seven hours for it to render.  So I was wondering if there was a faster way of getting the shadows on a matte/shadow object.  The shadows don’t really have to be on the character, I don’t need that much detail, I just wanted the shadows on the ground.  Anyone know how to do this with basic lights or do it faster with Mental Ray ones?

you could probably just render out the shadows on the plane (might not even need matte shadow) using the render elements.  this should work with lights other than MR.
this might still render the whole scene though at the same time and i’m pretty sure there’s a way to turn that off so just that one element renders.
another thing you could do is to turn off visible to camera in the character’s object properties.  this will make it still visible to the lights to get shadows,
but the character itself won’t be in the render, which should speed up rendering considerably.

the other thing to look at is the settings for the lights, shadows and renderer.  is there anything else you can turn off, lower quality or cache to speed up MR renderer?  if you are using MR Area Lights and Ray-Traced Shadows to get soft shadows, this usually kills render time.  Try using shadow-map type and filddle with Sample Range to get a (uniform) soft-shadow.

Thanks for the quick reply.  I messed around with the shadow map properties and it seems to work well enough for now.  With the other ideas you had, I’m guessing that would involve making the shadow render the environment map, then rendering the character on top of it?