Transparent shadow receiver in unity 5

Questions & Answers
1

Hello. Is it any way in Unity5 to make a transparent plane which can receive shadows?

3

Trawling the web for an answer to this problem, i have found this magnificent shader from Farfarer on https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/cutout-with-soft-edge-cutout-bumped-specular.150145/

Works like a treat on unity 5.5.2f1.

kudos Farfarer, thank you!

2

Yes, use any “Cutout” type shader in your material. You might know this already.

Standard Shader->Rendering mode->Cutout

But for real “Transparent” shaders (using texture alpha channel to set opacity of each pixel), there are not many satisfiying possibilities I know of.
This one for example has the trade-off of requiring Forward rendermode for your camera:

http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=TransparentShadowReceiver

Here is a post from 2008 where Aras (Unity Technologies) explains why its not a good idea to make transparent shaders include shadows. It has also some shader code posted by others over 8 years until yesterday :wink: :

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/no-shadows-visible-on-transparency-shaders.9909/

If I’m not wrong now, and I’m 95% sure that I’m not, this has not changed until today. In Unity that is.