The procedural texture making material you saw in the stream will still be a few versions out. The brick thing you saw was basically one big swiss-army material with lots of parameters. The “tool” captures screenshots of all the view buffers with a camera that is aligned with 0-1 UVs. So you could bake a material down fairly easily. And yes the unwrap and shadowmap tools are there now. Your post reminded me that I should have also included some examples on how you can use the depth texture on a “WorldPositionBehindTranslucency” shader to create a pseudo decal using a regular mesh…
We have documentation written for these elements that should be out tomorrow or Thursday.
And yes the imposters will cast a shadow. Currently though the shadow will fade away on one axis when the sprite geometry is parallel to the light vector. You can fix this by actually making your sprite a cross plane and projecting one of the planes 90 degrees to the camera facing one. So you will have an invisible sprite right in the middle that is parallel to the view direction, giving a solid 3d looking shadow. I actually had to do this exact thing on the recent Landscape demo pine trees. The distant LOD is a sprite that has a cross plane that you can’t actually see unless you disable the vertex shader.