Hide mesh but show it‘s shadows?

Questions
1

Is it possible to use mesh to make its shadow and hide it in the same time? I‘m planing to use tubes to make shadows but I would like to hide them and render lines instead (works better for my aeshetics).

2

Hey unfortunately so far we are not rendering meshes that are not visible but I could imagine an option for shadow maps to avoid this limitation

1 Like
3

I may have a way:
Use addLODLevel with the second parameter as null.
But that may be an error in BJS and will not work forever.

4

This is a bug indeed, setting a LOD to null should remove the mesh and hence its shadow.

You can display the shadow of a mesh without showing the mesh by applying a material with disableColorWrite = disableDepthWrite = true:

https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#F7KZ7C#12

Another way to do it is to set visibility = 0 for the mesh and enable shadow transparency by setting transparencyShadow = true on the shadow generator:

https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#F7KZ7C#13