So I recently got around to upgrading to Unreal 4.10 when I’ve previously been using 4.7 for a while. When I upgraded my project (I made a copy so I still have the original), I ran into a strange issue with the lighting.
So my game heavily features sprites which cast shadows into the world like paper cutouts. In 4.7, I was able to do this by assigning the “MaskedLitSprite” material to it, then enabling cast shadow, but in 4.10, this doesn’t seem to work. While the sprite still gets “lit”, it doesn’t cast a shadow even if the setting is checked.
Just to make sure there was nothing wrong with my project, I made two clean projects from scratch using both versions of the engine and did the steps again. The same exact result: 4.10 is missing the shadow while 4.7 achieves the effect I want.
I’m suspecting that this is a bug, but for the time being, is there a workaround?
Have you enabled ‘Cast Shadow’ for the asset in the Details panel for the selected object in your world? I tested this with the Default Sprite guy from the Paper2D Template Project.
Masked sprites will cast a shadow when this is enabled. If you’re building lighting the material should have “Cast Shadow as Masked” enabled in it’s attributes.
If this is a Translucent Material these are not expected to cast shadows. You can use the Volumetric Translucent Shadow, but the more opaque a material is, the more artefacts can show up when using this method.
If you’re still having issue, please post more details about your setup with the material used, the settings in the details panel for the asset showing that cast shadows is enabled, whether you’re using baked or dynamic shadows for this, whether you’re using a masked or translucent material, and if your not sure about some things you can upload an asset or small test project with a single asset to show the issue for debugging.
Still having the issue, so I uploaded two projects created with 4.7 (ShadowWorking.zip) and 4.10 (ShadowNotWorking). Using the paper character blueprint, I only changed two settings in each project: the material to “MaskedLitSpriteMaterial” and “Cast Shadow” being checked. ShadowWorking has the effect I want, and ShadowNotWorking does not.
