Wintermute Engine Forum

Wintermute Engine => Scripts, plugins, utilities, goodies => Topic started by: McCloud on September 20, 2005, 01:21:04 AM

Title: Creating Partial Shadows on your 2D Actors
Post by: McCloud on September 20, 2005, 01:21:04 AM
Just a tip I thought I would share.
I've noticed that you can create a decoration floor to make your actor darker for when he is walking it dark areas, but what about shadows that only cover a partial area of the actor?

I've found a simple trick you can do to get around this, it may not work with all scenes, but here is what I did.

1:)  In Photoshop I open up my rendered scene and create a new layer. 
2:)  Using a hard brush, I paint over in the scene where I want my shadows to appear, I used black, but you can use any color.
3:)  Once you have your shadows set go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur
4:)  Apply an ammount that you think looks good.
5:)  In the layer of your shadows set a transparency level.
6:)  Hide the rendered scene layer and save the file as PNG.
7:)  Load the file in your scene in SceneEdit and move the layer to the correct spot


Tips: 
1:)  Use one of your sprite images between the image and shadows layer to see an over all affect.
2:)  You can also select an area and do a graduate fill so that it has nice color changes.

Problems:
1:)  It makes your overall scene maybe too dark in some areas if it already has heavy shadows.
2:)  Effect only works in 3D Accelerated mode.
3:) The shadows are 2D so it may not look right in some cases.

Hope some of you finds this helpful.

-McCloud