I’m having a problem with this… not sure how to solve it as this “transparent switch” does not do anything using a custom Lightmap Parameter for the object in question.
I have a plane that uses an opacity map (baked into Alpha channel for albedo) that creates a chainlink fence. In realtime lighting with shadows, the links look great. However, if I try to bake the light/shadow… the plane blocks and shadows everything.
(see image below)
in the sample, you can see as I drag the point light around, the shadow of the fencing is working… on the right side, you can see the results after the bake… gi has completely ignored any transparency. (also note the impact of lighting on the glass behind the fencing).
how do I solve this?
been at this for a while now, trying anything I can think of or read about to get this working in bake… just isn’t working.
from another angle, I moved the light outside the window and disabled backface culling on the shader for the chainlink and glass… the top image is using realtime point light, the bottom is baked.
I don’t recall having this problem with beast… is this just a limit in enlighten, or am I overlooking something so simple?
well… I have a workaround of sorts… it just will require a bit more effort to get the look that I desire. (sutle lighting in image below near orange arrows)
I can do a bake using cutout to get the light/shadow coming through the broken glass, swap materials for final use and add a single realtime point light in the space to generate any extra fx (in this case, getting the chainlink to shadow against the window). An added benefit is the cast of light/shadow onto the floor.
However, doing this I am not able to yet get the tinting of the glass onto the shadow on surfaces like the floor and fence posts (it should be blue’ish)… I’ll need to work out the cutout texture and use something separate then the opacity map from the original material.
This would be a whole like easier if the bake respected the opacity on the transparency map (alpha channel in albedo).
Is this something that will be supported when Enlighten is upgraded to version 3.x?