The approach to shadows?

[Des-Nerger]

Could you add a bit of info on the "right way" of making shadows for Diablo II? Or more specifically, what should be the best material configuration for the z=0 shadow-catching plane?

Generally speaking, since the Blender's "Cycles" which is encouraged to use is a path-tracer, and a D2 graphical scene is constructed from pieces not known ahead of time, there inevitably gonna be some inconsistencies in light paths (even if the game didn't actually do its own shading on top of the pre-rendered assets). So when thinking about things like the shadow-catching plane, the goal I guess is to minimize those inconsistencies, no to eliminate them (because it's impossible). :thinking:

[muitdebos]

Sorry for the very late reply. There are two types of shadows for what I think you're talking about;

• For monsters and other animated entities, this is done by the game itself. It renders the image skewed and scaled down, in all black, to add shadows dynamically.

• For environment pieces, like "shadow tiles" that for instance go with some trees and other pieces, there you would indeed need to render it out. I haven't done anything with that so I don't know the best way directly, but I imagine a full white floor that only catches the shadows. Then if you render it out, make sure that the white becomes transparent and the shadow remains black. You might need to do some postprocessing on that, again, I haven't experimented with this