Can billboards face light sources for shadows?

Feature requests
1

Not sure if this is doable or if the effort would be very high but thought I’d throw this out there.

I’m working on a simple 2.5D game and the most visually displeasing thing right now is that when you move around the shadows for tall trees (billboard Y-axis) grow and shrink depending on the billboard’s rotation to the light. Here is a quick video: https://youtu.be/NiCJl96RO4E

What I visually want is for the tree shadows to always be the full size shadow (as if the tree faces the light source for the shadow.)

2

@JacobF you could maybe create a second, custom light-aligned billboard using TransformNode.lookAt() . I’d imagine it should also be possible to make this second, light-aligned version invisible to the camera yet still cast shadows, but I’m unsure exactly how to do that just yet.

3

I found this PG - simple to hide the second custom billboard yet still make it cast shadows

https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#PY2MKZ#5

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4

Sweet, that actually worked out pretty well. The only thing is I needed to remove shadowGenerator.enableSoftTransparentShadow = true so hopefully I don’t need that in the future :sweat_smile: Thanks!

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