For my project I need to be able to render the shadows of meshes on a simple plane, but the plane should be invisible.
I’ve searched for a few hours for a solution, but the only thing I can find is how to make an invisible mesh to still render shadows on other meshes. this is NOT what I want :s
I’m starting to think that I’ll have to do some custom shader magic, but I have almost no experience with making my own shaders.
Can someone help me out or point me in the right direction?
This is generally somewhat problematic to achieve, with deferred lighting in particular. You would need intermediate shader coding skills to implement that. I’d suggest you to think about possible workarounds.
For example, if you have only one shadow receiver plane and one directional light, you could try rendering some sort of reverse shadows using scene capture actor, positioned at the plane and oriented towards light. Then you could check if scene depth, rendering by this capture actor, is lower than certain threshold, and make a mask, which you could use as opacity mask for shadow receiver plane material, which in its turn would be just unlit black mat.