Mesh Instance Receiving Shadow

Questions
1

Yo @Deltakosh and @sebavan … I am having issues with Mesh Instances and OVERRIDING receive shadows.

I ask ChatGPT (before i started messing with mesh instances) if can have separate receiveShadows for each instance:

can babylonjs meshinstance receive shadows

ChatGPT said:
In Babylon.js, MeshInstance (specifically, InstancedMesh) can receive shadows, but you have to enable it properly.

Here's the key:

Each InstancedMesh inherits the receiveShadows and castShadows properties from its source mesh at creation time.

However, you can override instance.receiveShadows = true manually if needed.

But it not working right. Here are a couple of playgrounds:

Not showing shadows because Line 36 sets receiveShadows = false
even though the override for the instance at Line 42 is setting receiveShadows = true

Is Working If I Enable Shadows On Source Mesh At Line 36

Aren’t I supposed to be able to set receive shadows independent of the source mesh ?

2

The instanced mesh will take whatever value was set on the source mesh, and you cannot update the receiveShadows field on an instance- you can see in the console the below warning is logged.

In our docs we specify the properties which can be modified here

image
image719×177 5.37 KB

However this line which mentions ‘Instances are supported for collisions, picking, rendering and shadows’ may be what chat was reading / interpreting

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3

One of possible workarounds to use another mesh which doesn’t receive shadows - https://playground.babylonjs.com/?BabylonToolkit#9FBCRL#3

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