[Tutorial] Fake ‘baked’ shadow in Unity Indie

April 17, 2013 by IMGVERTEX 2 Comments

So, i found this trick while I’m bored and thinking of when i’ll get an Unity Pro. I though it is possible to have a fake shadow in Unity Indie. However, it still not really good, but i think it’s better than ‘baked’ shadow from lightmapper (It save times alot). So, it’ll look like this.

1. First, open your favorite 3D modelling apps, import your model, render as 1024×1024 PNG in front side.
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3. Now open photoshop or your favorite photo editing software. Import the rendered 1024×1024 PNG, make it black by double clicking Layer 0 and check the Color Overlay. Set the color to black on Color Overlay settings, then click OK. You also need to blur it a little bit. Click Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set the amount 5 or 10. Flatten the image, and save it as JPG.
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5. Import that edited JPG file to Unity. Read this. After you finished set the blob shadow, set your projector properties like this.
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7. REMEMBER! The Blob Shadow Object should placed in the root of your scene. Now go find a directional light, and copy the directional light’s rotation to blob shadow rotation. After you set it, now place it on the object that you want to add the shadow. Don’t forget to set the object a layer (for example, Me : NoShadow).
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9. After you set the shadow as a child of your object, now set the shadow positions to Vector3.zero. I mean (0,0,0).
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11. Set your camera to isometric and object rotation to global, it make much easier to placing the shadow. You just need to rotate the Z axis. If you touched X and Y axis, you are gonna had a bad time.
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13. Now lookie what we have here, a fake ‘baked’ shadow in less than 5 minutes! Still better than ‘baked’ shadow that need 2 hours to finish it and the result was awful. So what do you think ?
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