Nice New Stupid Blender Question....

[andylegate]

Okay, I thought I knew how to do this, but as it's not working right, the answer must be, no, I don't know how to do it....

I've got my ground. It's a grid of X by X squares.......
I've edited it using the proportional editing tool to make my nice gental dips and rises.
And I've textured it just right.

Now down the road, I've put in my lighting, and I need to add some shade. No problem for the flat areas, I just make a plane, put it very close to the ground, and texture it with a transparancy of a shade. Looks great!

But, now I've got some parts of the ground where I need to put shade, but the ground has some dips or rises. I suppose I could make another, much smaller grid, and try (emphasis on the word try) to make it the same shape as the ground.
But instead I have this bright idea:

Select my grid that is the ground there, and go to Edit mode. I then select each square in that part of the grid where I'm going to need my shading. I then go Shift D, and tah dah! I 've got a duplicate grid shaped exactly like that area! Move it up just a tad....

Okay, now I remove the material that was duplicated also, and create a new material and then apply my UV map that is my new texture with shadow........

Except that doesn't work. If I do that, it changes the whole ground. It's like the faces of the grid that I duplicated are still tied to the main ground some how, so any changes I make it it, affects the whole ground grid....

Is there anyway to stop that? This is a nice, easy way to overlay something on your ground and make it look smooth.

[Paradox]

You could use static object shadows from the lights, you could add multiple textures and map both a ground texture and a shadow texture onto your plane, or you could use vertex paint to darken the shadow parts.

[andylegate]

Okay, got it, found out how to do it:

Use Seperate. Then click on the new grid and go shift D to duplicate it. Just did it, and I now have a shadow that flows perfectly with the ground.

Thanks for you suggestions Paradox. Vertex painting would be the easiest, but this is a HUGE area that I'm making shadows in. Not to mention the vertex's of the grids are not that close together (something like each one is 1 yard by 1 yard or so), and when I've tried vertex painting shadows I end up with some.......interesting results, but nothing that looks real.

Using a seperate plane like a decal works great, as long as the surface is flat. I needed something that would match the terrain perfectly, and this method works great.

[Trylon]

you could also add an extra texture layer defining the shadows (black/white or greyscale), and set it's blend style to "multiply".

[Aloys]

As Daryl suggests, using multi-texturing is probably the best way to go. Especially if you object is a simple grid, the mapping shouldn't be too stretched. You don't need a large texture for that, depending on the size of your landscape something like 256*256 or even 128*128 could be enough, for a 'very large' terrain you could go up to 512*512.
Vertex painting could work too, but if you're looking for really smooth shadows a texture will probably look better.

[Zander]

Separate, then duplicate? Is that what I should have been doing with my grass patch?

[Trylon]

Nope, Duplicate first, then separate. IF you don't, things get weird.

After separation (p-key), leave edit mode, and select the part that you separated with the right mouse button.