How to create fake shadows

Development Rendering
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I’m working on a prototype third person game but in VR so I’m trying to keep everything as optimized as possible.

Because of this my lighting is baked on each level and I do not have any real time shadow casting lights at the moment.

I’m now looking for ideas on how to add some sort of fake or projected shadow, similar to how Diablo 3 looks;

In that video the shadows seems to be from a fake light source and do not get affected by the lighting in the scene.

I would be happy with a simple blob shadow, it doesn’t have to be too fancy, just something to help ground the characters.

How would I go about setting up something like this in Unreal?

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I do not know how complex your world might be but you can have a look at Decals here: Using Decals in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation

What you would want to do is have the floor be able to receive decals and your character not receive Decals (so that the shadow draws only on the floor). Then have the decal be always under the character. This way, the decal (e.g. a blob) will behave like a fake shadow.

Something to notice though is that a decal has a finite range so if your character jumps you might want to either ignore the Character’s Z value (and have the decal always at a fixed Z value, but this might be an issue when working with different heights) or have the decal’s height big enough so that the shadow is always projected even when the character jumps.

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Thanks, I should have thought of decals.

I just did a quick test and it was very easy to add a blob shadow, but thanks to adding decal into my google searches, I’ve now found a few other tutorials on the subject.

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I just made a video that goes over how to use a “Shadow Pass Switch” that might help: Fake Shadows and Colored Light Function - YouTube