[Bf-funboard] Shadow casting particles

[Robert Wenzlaff]

On Monday 20 December 2004 07:49, joeedh wrote:
> >If you are using shaded halos to do something like smoke, you can always
> >duplicate your emitter, parent and duplivert a mesh to it, and set it to
> >shadow only.
> >
>
> Halos are meant to emulate spherical volumetric space, right?  So just
> input to the raytrace the equation for a sphere to do your shadow
> calculation.

Well, halos were a more-or-less a post-process step in the original renderer, 
they are integrated in the unified renderer though.  But either way, it 
should be theoretically possible to have a halo cast a shadow.  The problem 
lies in how halos are typically used.  Typically you set halo particals to 
have a very very low alpha.  They only become visible where a large number of 
them overlap (the add parameter).   This might be ok for raytraced shadows 
where alpha can be accounted for, but would give awful results with buffered 
shadows.

But again, I'm not sure what the original poster meant.  His "known for ages" 
and "appear as a fuzzy blob" lines don't jive.
-- 
*********************************************
Robert Wenzlaff   rwenzlaff at soylent-green.com