What I am trying to do is create a transparent material from a .png file, and attach it to a quad. This works fine for me.
However, when I go to make it cast a shadow, I get a square shaped shadow - the geometry is what is responsible for casting, and I want the material to be responsible for it (if that makes sense.)
On top of getting a square shadow, my transparent material will block out the shadow, while letting the color of the background show through just fine.
How can I make this render properly?
Sorry if this is horribly unclear, I’m very new and don’t know the proper terminology quite yet!
Thanks for the help!
You can’t for now.
It’s a known issue of the shadow renderers, they don’t handle transparency/translucency.
it’s in the todo list
Ah ha! Thanks for the info! Where can I find this todo list?
Do I have any alternatives? Could I create geometry from a .png file in a similar manner to creating terrain from perlin noise?
meat said:
Where can I find this todo list?
Well...you can't really, it's my personal todo list in our JME google doc repo.
meat said:
Do I have any alternatives? Could I create geometry from a .png file in a similar manner to creating terrain from perlin noise?
I guess it could work, as long as your geometry renders in the depth buffer.
So I did some looking around for depth buffer and ended up more stumped than before.
How would I go about creating a mesh or geometry from an image file? I hope I don’t seem like I require hand holding, I just don’t know where to start.
You could create a terrain from a heightmap, which I think would be what you want.
I was thinking the same thing, but then how do I go about trimming off the transparent areas? Or will it know not to add geometry there?
If I just make a heightmapped terrain, and rotate it to the upright position, won’t I just end up with a Han Solo in Carbonite sort of effect?