Shadow model specs?

Not much turned up in searches so....

....I took my first crack at a lo-poly shadow model, textured with black, transparency set to 75% or so, Normals facing out. Added it to the .car. With Alphas either drawn or not, I don't see the shadow model. I haven't verified that it fits inside the body -- would parts external to the body be invisible? Is anything above wrong?

I didn't texturized my shadow. slowDan wrote me you need to have a closed mesh. Then import in MI. At this point you need to uncheck disable shadow and choose from "Edit Menu->Generate Shadowing Info".

Now save your .mdl and add this string in .car:

Code:

shadowModel "yourcar_shadow.mdl"

DANDY wrote:....I took my first crack at a lo-poly shadow model,

You don't need any sort of texture, just leave it as default white. The important part is that it should be a closed shape. This means no holes or slits, as it you were trying to make it watertight.

In Model Importer, uncheck the disable shadows check box and choose generate shadow information (or something! ) from the edit menu. You should then see a bunch of lines shooting down-left across the screen which are the shadows it will cast. If there are any problems with the model (holes or disconnected edges) they will show up as green lines. Go back fix them and re-import. Its a good idea to generate shadows before you scale the model down to normal size (if you need to!)

It will be invisible in game apart from the shadows it creates. So if it is larger than the car you will see it as a patch of body that is permanently in shadow.

Don beat me to most of it. I'll post it anyway, I'm not wasting all that typing!

Ahhh, thx! It was the generate shadows I was missing, thinking the custom model would self-generate them in-game. Or something like that. It should be good to go once I get back to it.