Abrupt change in shadow effects when using ShadowOnlyMaterial

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1

When I was playing with shadows I encountered a strange issue with ShadowOnlyMaterial, please refer to this playground: https://playground.babylonjs.com/#ZT8BKT#89

There is an abrupt change in shadow effects between camera beta Math.PI/15 and Math.PI/14. This does not happen if the ground uses StandardMaterial (line 22).

Interestingly, if I change the ball visibility to 1, this artifact disappears, however I need to see the tube inside the ball so that does not work.

Would highly appreciate any insight on this. Thanks!

2

It’s an ordering problem between the ground and the ball: sometimes the ground is displayed before the ball, and sometimes it’s the reverse. That’s because both objects are considered transparent, which is sometimes a pain to deal with (see Transparent Rendering | Babylon.js Documentation).

In your case, you can force the ground to be displayed first by setting ground.alphaIndex = 0;:

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3

This nailed it! Thank you very much for the explanation and solution.