Is there any way to get true shadows from a foliage texture?

[Fidcal]

Is there any way to get true shadows from a two-sided foliage texture like ivy which uses alphatest? Removing noshadows and adding forceshadows just casts a rectangular shadow for the whole patch.

[rich_is_bored]

Stencil shadows only consider geometry. They don't care what texture is applied.

[Fidcal]

I never noticed before.

[rebb]

You could try to fake shadows using blendLights with a "blend modulate" material.

One of the beta mappers used this to fake tree shadows, iirc.

 

The only problem with this is that it can easily look "wrong" because the faked shadow will get multiplied on top of the actual ingame lighting/shadowing.

 

Or you can wait until D3 goes open source, then everyone and their grandmother will implement shadow-maps - they adhere to alpha-tested surfaces.

[Fidcal]

Thanks. Not critical as I was mostly curious what might be done that way, maybe soft shadows using a crumb texture. Should have known somebody would have done it by now if it were possible.

[Serpentine]

A very limited but somewhat interesting technique :

You can also use an alpha blend stage on the receiving material with the alpha channel blending as black ontop of it then use the 'alpha' keyword to change the darkness of the blend. It wont respond to light really, but it can be used to crease some nice out of reach details.

 

I think you could also get plants to have ghetto shadows by making a blank material decal to place under the plant like an occlusion blob and then using 'spectrum' remove the shadow when the player lantern is nearby. Would be more useful if there was a blur image program(not fragment shader, that would be expensive and dynamic)