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Translucent materials not receiving dynamic shadow?

Development Discussion Rendering
#1

Hey,

I use Terrain spline for drawing road and I want to use translucent material so I can blend it nicely with the terrain materials, but I can’t get the road receive dynamic shadows from objects. I understand the translucent cannot cast shadows (except that Unreal supports masked shadow casting), but it should receive those none the less. I have tried making the road with masked material too, but I don’t feel like I can get good enough quality from it with alpha test only.

Do you have any idea what I might be doing wrong? The material itself is very simple and the spline mesh is just a quad.

Screenshot 2015-02-18 09.20.45.png

As you can see in the image, the dynamic shadows cast from the sphere do not shadow the road.

Alternative I was thinking was decal like blending where it just draws diffuse and normal before shadow pass, but I have no idea how that could be done… :slight_smile:

#2

this was a limitation in UE3, and frankly it looks to be the same here :frowning:

#3

Shame… Understandable but shame still.

Then my second question is: Can I somehow make a material that doesn’t affect shadow casting at all but instead is “injected” before shadow pass similarly to how decals work? Decals without decal object :slight_smile:

#4

What you are describing is how decals work =)

#5

But decals require you to use decal system and decal material doesn’t work on mesh? I need to blend mesh and material like the decals are blended :slight_smile:

#6

Can you not use decals with the spline tool?

#7

Nopes, sadly not. And decal material type doesn’t work in mesh (the material assigned to mesh stays “grey”).

#8

Has there been any improvements on Translucent materials receiving shadow over the past 8 months? :slight_smile:

OR

Has someone made a hack where I could easily change the draw order of Translucent materials so that they would be drawn under shadows instead of on top of it. It would create some issues normally for first/third person viewed games, but would work decent enough (vs no shadows at all on translucent objects) on our case where all the translucent objects are always near flat on ground.

#9

I guess that it’s still not possible to receive dynamic shadows on translucent material?

#10

Any News to this since 2016?

#11

there’s the translucency shadow volume now. a limited-distance volume (with hard cut) with low-res voxel-based shadows to affect translucency. it’s enough for some game types but far from a silver bullet.

I still don’t get why UE4 can’t project the shadow maps against translucent objects in the translucency pass, like some other engines do

#12

I also search for the answer…but found nothing. :frowning: And I found many ways that unity could do it…