Creating Shadows of 2D Characers...who're on planes?

Unity Engine
1

Alright…this is kindof a complex one…so get your thinking hats on…

I’m creating a 2.5D game using 2D images on planes, but the 2D images are rendered from 3D models, and I am curious with the 3D lighting and all… if I can create shadows for my characters? It is a little complex because the shadows would have to be…

  1. 2D images themselves…argh!!

  2. Plain (such as tiny circular shadows beneath the characters)

  3. Incredibly Complex, coming out of shaped objects behind the Plane or self-generated.

2

  1. Use your characters’ diffuse textures multiplied by black and with some transluency. You just have to squash and skew the quads on which you apply these shadows to give some angle. There might be some offset between your characters’ feet and their shadow which will require manual tweaking. You could also use a smaller mipmap level of your diffuse for your shadows to blur them and somewhat hide this problem.

  2. blob shadows are indeed easy to implement

  3. if you want incredibly complex shadows don’t make a 2.5D game but a full 3D one ^^

3

Thank you.

I will look into creating some 2D shadows, or shadows along with all sprites.

After that, if it isn’t worth the effort or I can’t do it-- I will use blob shadows.

I actually don’t care about shadows at all. But everyone wants shadows in their games, and I have gotten a lot of complaints over the year because of the lack of shadows.