Building Static Meshes for Shadow Casting
From FleshWorks
by rujuro
There are two important things to keep in mind to make sure your static meshes will cast shadows properly:
- The mesh must be fully enclosed with no holes or open edges of any kind. An easy way to check this is to apply the STL Check modifier to the model in MAX. Under the Errors header push the Open Edge button. Click the Check checkbox and it should highlight any errors in the mesh. If there are any errors that are not corrected the mesh will not project any shadows.
- If the mesh is exceptionally large you need to tesselate it at regular intervals. If there are no vertices near the light that is trying to cast a shadow, it seems to have trouble anchoring the stencil projection properly and will give inaccurate results. It doesn't have to be much, just so there are vertices located not too far from the light that is projecting.
Those are the major pitfalls I encountered. After that simply bring in the mesh, add the property Render-> CastShadows (since this is off by default), make sure it's set to true, and you should have some excellent, deadly, shadows.
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