[Bug] Additive Material causing square particle shadow.

Additive materials seem to generate a square particle shadow, as can be seen in this particle system. There is no texture entry into opacity, so opacity is controlled purely by the ParticleColor material expression, it’s a very simple additive material.

I’m not entirely sure these bright orbs would generate shadows anyway, is the only solution here to split this system up and use two particles?

Hi James,

Thank you for your report. Could you post a screenshot of your material and its properties? If you would like to remove shadows, you can set Translucency Self Shadowing > Translucent Shadow Density Scale to 0 and remove the shadow entirely.

Cheers!

Alexander

Awesome! Still trying to work my head around all the new translucency flags. And yeh I’ll upload a shot ASAP. It’s really simple, just a grayscale texture multiplied by particle color into Emissive, and the alpha of the same particle color node into opacity.

I know this is a really old post, but I am seeing the same thing. You are correct that that setting the shadow density scale to 0 will fix the issue, but if you are using blend mode Additive there’s a couple steps you have to do first. First you will need to change it to Translucent and Lit before you can change the density value. Once you change it, then set the blend mode back to additive and unlit and the shadows will be gone.

I’m glad I found this post, even though the fix takes a bit of a work around, I hope this helps.

Hello! I want to create distortion material like heat distortion from explosion. A can’t use translucent material, because it turn off my normal map.

This material maks shadows, but I dont need shadows from heat distortion.

How can I make distortion without shadows?
Thank you!