Transparent entities with shadows

timCopwell

I need to have some props being semi transparent and having a shadow at the same time. I came to solution to have couple meshes inside Body, one having a transparency flag checked on material, and second having to only cast shadow. But as far it seems as an easy way out, I'm worried about performance issues in future. As while I'll have for example 100 entities on my scene, instead there will be 200 actually.

I've made a quick testing by duplicating 4000 bodies like that, but didn't see anything wrong with it, it showed perfect performance, but at at the same time it was only an empty, static scene.

Am I going too superstitious here? Or maybe there is another better way to do what I need?

Megalomaniak

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Calinou

I'm worried about performance issues in future. As while I'll have for example 100 entities on my scene, instead there will be 200 actually.

Performance will probably be fine if your meshes aren't too complex. If you are using complex meshes, you can try to use less detailed meshes as your shadow meshes to reduce the load on the GPU. If the number of draw calls ends up too high, you can use level of detail to speed up rendering by culling distant meshes.

cybereality

Yeah, I don't see why that would be a problem. Several hundred objects are no problem to render. If it was several thousand, maybe, but a few hundred is fine, even on mobile or HTML5. You can also make the shadow casters simpler geometry, that can help.