I tried using this method, but I can’t seem to make it work. So I’m trying the shadow pass switch trick, as seen in the Artstation description, I have both a White on black texture of planet earth, and a white on alpha. I tried every possible combination. Shadow Pass switch doesn’t seem to work in any way whatsoever, I always get the shadow for the whole texture, no matter the combination I insert in to the shadow pass switch, I can’t seem to get the silhouette of the continents, I get a flat shadow.
Only way it kinda works is if I plug the texture directly into the opacity mask, but then I get a masked planet, with transparency on the black areas of the texture, and even in that case, volumetric shadows works only from a direct light source, no volumetric shadows coming from point or area lights (and yes, I’ve enabled both cast shadows and cast volumetric shadows for the light sources, nothing changes),
Am I missing something? Raytracing is enabled in the project, I do get volumetric ray traced shadows from a directional light, but it doesn’t work on point light or area light, and other than that, I can’t seem to use the shadow pass switch to trick unreal to use the texture only to affect shadows without actually masking the texture on the planet.
There’s something I’ve noticed, in the planet material, in the advanced section, just underneath the Decal Response (DBuffer), there’s a checkmark for Cast Dynamic Shadow as Masked, and that’s turned off and greyed out. I tried switching everything in order to make it available, but nothing.
Am I missing something? I feel like there’s some parameter that needs to be checked on or off, maybe in the project settings, and everything will work as it should…