Realistic drop shadow for complex item in Photoshop

Hi

For realism, outside of rendering a shadow catcher layer when rendering the 3D object, there is no substitute for manually painting.

Put a new empty layer between your subject layer and the background. Set this empty layer to blend mode multiply. Paint in the shadows with a soft, low opacity ( around 20-20%) brush set to black. If you go to far, then to remove shadows switch the brush to white and paint again. This will lighten the shadow.

Build you shadow in sevetsl stroked. Shadows should be darker at the point where the object touches the ground and fade from there depending on the light sources.

Dave

for fast mockups of shadow its hard to bet Adobe Dimension

I agree with Stephen_A_Marsh that getting [or making] the 3D model will give best results

This appears to be a 3D render on a transparent background.

So why render without a cast shadow/ground plane?

The light source is obvious in the render, so you know where to cast the shadow.

Perhaps doing a little bit of research into fine art painting would help.

For others, here is the PSD saved as a PNG with alpha.

Hi

You might want to read this thread where realistic shadows were discussed after a couple of folks got them wrong in last week's photo challenge:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/something-for-the-weekend-part-92-going-underground/m-p/11122787

You can paint the shadow in on a new layer with a soft brush and lowered opacity.

I can't download your psd on my iPad.

~ Jane

I can't see your attached PSD file.  I prefer embedded images so I don't have to download a file.

A Divide & Conquer approach might work.  Put each element or object on it's own layer so you can concentrate on the  shadows for one region at a time.  For concealing and revealing regions, Layer Masks are your best friend.

It sound like what you want is a cast shadow, rather than a drop shadow. Try searching for that, there are lots of tutorials for it out there.