Ok. I have a creature that moves. As it moves, he leaves footprints. Each footprint is a plane with the same texture as the terrain it is placed on. The footprints are using the transparent-bumped-diffuse shader. I need the transparency b/c in need to be able to fade them out over time.
The problem: The terrain texture appears to be affected by lighting–it is brighter in some areas than others. My footprint planes don’t seem to be affected by lighting. They are as bright/dark as I set them in the material inspector. So, the greater the disparity betweem the lighting of the terrain and the brightness of the footprint, the more the footprint tiles do not match/blend into the terrain.
What transparent-bump shader should I be using so the foorprint tiles will be affected by the lighting in the same way as the terrain?
Let me ask this differently, as I have discovered something while playing around. Why does lighting of the terrain work differently than lighting of objects? If I create a plane and apply to it the same texture as the terrain, and the terrain isn’t using a lightmap (so both the terrain and the plane are affected by the same light), and then I place that plane on the terrain, in some places the texture brightness will match, and in others, it won’t. Why is that?
Ok. I think I’ve sorted out the problem, but now I need to know the resolution. The transparent-bumped-difuse shader is a pixel-lit shader. I think the terrain is vertex lit. I think this b/c when I switch my shader to a vertex-lit, it matches the terrain’s lighting. However, b/c I need the bump portion, my plane needs to be pixel-lit.
So, how do I get the same brightness on my plane as on my terrain dynamically?
Projectors are a nice idea, but the foorprints wouldn’t look nearly as good as they do bumpmapped. And I don’t know that I would be able to control transparency through a projector.
