Shadow problem

[Jonnee]

Please have a look at the picture below.
For any reason there are random shadows on the wall, that I don't want to have there. The object is shadeless, so it doesn't cause shadows to other objects. Sure. And it doesn't have a specified vertex colour. I will do that later by myself to imitate light effects.
But why does it throw a shadow to itself and how can I turn it of?

Someone has an idea please?
Thank you.

[Marcello]

The rope construction looks awesome! About the shadows... hmmm strange.

[boblishman]

ok...try this:

In Blender:

a) Select the object
b) change the view to SOLID (not textured)
c) Select "Vertex Paint"

Is the entire object totally white? (Sometimes objects can "aquire" a degree of vertex painting for no apparent reason, especially if the object was created by using several (previously) seperate objects...)

OK ... if the object is all white, then you can eliminate the vertex painting ... and it has to be something else...

I am assuming that the whole object is one single object?

The other thing you could do is: (make a backup copy of your Blender file first, and using the backup file ....)

a) Select your Object with the bad shadow
b) Press H (which will hide it)
c) Press A and select EVERYTHING else (all your other objects)
d) Hit the delete key and delete all the objects
e) Press Alt+H to unhide your "bad" object
f) Go to ... File/External Data/Pack into BlendFile
g) Save AS "badobject.blend" to your desktop
h) Pack this Blendfile (which should be quite small, and only have your one object in it) into a rar file ... and upload here


... then we can have a look at it and maybe have a better chance of helping (it's quite difficult to guess what could be wrong without being able to see the blend file)


EDIT: By the way, you have got Shadbuf turned OFF (it is on by default) on the object's material ... ? (That would cause it to cast a shadow on itself)

[boblishman]

The object is shadeless, so it doesn't cause shadows to other objects

btw, the Shadeless button does not affect shadows (of any kind) ... it affects the specularity (shineyness) of the object's material ...

[Jojon]

To elaborate a little on Boblish's answers, shadeless makes the object not be affected (both diffuse and specular, I believe) by any lights: if you make it all medium grey - it appears medium grey in game, regardless of lamps present. If your material is shadeless, you'll have to give it some ambient light, using the "Amb" slider under "Shaders", or it will show up black. Since we can all see the great-looking stuff in your picture, I'd say you've got that well down. :)

You know this, but I might as well put it down anyway: the specular light is kind of like a second pass of shading, on top of the diffuse, but it is non-linear, meaning there will be a sharp dropoff from a bright spot at one corner, to the other corners of a face. The "spe" color will simply be added to the "col" one, how much and how "tight" the "hotspot" is, is regulated by the "Spec" and "Hard" sliders in the "Shaders" panel. It is still goreaud, only non-linear, but it does give you a sort of cubist phong-ish feeling. :P

Once you've got that pesky default-on drop shadow-casting of the material disabled, via the "Shadbuf" button, you should also be able to notice a bit of increased in-game performance.

If I'm not wrong, when you create a new vertex-paint layer, it will contain an approximation of any texture mapped to the mesh.

[Christian Walther]

Are you talking about the fact that the left three (or six) wall segments appear darker than the rightmost one, and you think they should appear the same? If so, it may be that your normals are the wrong way around, so that the surface acts as if it's facing away from the light source when it's in fact facing towards it. In that case, you probably also have a negative scaling on the object (otherwise the back-face culling would appear reversed too, i.e. you'd see through the front faces of the object at the back faces). See this thread for a demonstration of the problem.