I was wondering if anyone knows how to get 3D Max to render those drop shadows you see in the old 2D RPGs inventories. What I want to do is render out a sword or dagger with a solid black drop shadow under it and the background has to be a perfect magenta colour RGB (255,0,255).

Its going to be difficult to get that kind of color precision from 3d rendering app. Your best bet, would be to render to a 2d image and then process in a 2d app.

There must be a way of doing it (as Max is heavily geared towards making games). Someone out there must know. All I want to do is turn off the light shading for a plane situated just behind one of the 3D objects. That way it would render with a flat colour.

One way to do that would be to turn off the Ambient, Diffuse and Specular by setting them all to black in the material properties for the plane. Then, just to the right of that you should see Self-Illumination properties. Check the Color box and set the color to magenta (or whatever you want). That should give your plane the standard flat non-shaded "magic pink" color.

CodeMunkie:
Just tried that but when you turn on self illumination the drop shadow disappears. I''m sure what I want to do can be done though. I''ve seen hundreds of frames of animations with drop shadows in somke games and there''s no way anyone would have time to do it by hand.

You can have a transparent object that receives shadows (EDIT: this is a "Matte" material, as Rockin said below); they're used quite often for compositing. As for the magenta, just set it as the background color in the environment options.

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How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

[edited by - sneftel on August 29, 2003 5:13:09 PM]

[edited by - sneftel on August 29, 2003 5:16:51 PM]

This is quite easy..
First, you need to set the background to mangenta.
Then create a box behind your object. Create a Matte/Shadow material, enable ''recieve shadows'' and assign it to the box.
The background is mangenta and you have a shadow on it!
!BUT the shadow blends with the background and you could have some nasty artifacts in the game.
One solution> make the background black, and go to the material''s parameters and set the shadow''s color to(5,5,5). Your shadow should look nice now..

Bye now. Must go and listen to some heavy metal.

Make the material non-perfect magenta, and use a post-process filter to turn it into perfect magenta.

To render the drop shadow, just put a plane/quad behind the object, for the light to shine a shadow on.

quote:

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Original post by Rockin
This is quite easy..
First, you need to set the background to mangenta.
Then create a box behind your object. Create a Matte/Shadow material, enable ''recieve shadows'' and assign it to the box.
The background is mangenta and you have a shadow on it!
!BUT the shadow blends with the background and you could have some nasty artifacts in the game.
One solution> make the background black, and go to the material''s parameters and set the shadow''s color to(5,5,5). Your shadow should look nice now..

Bye now. Must go and listen to some heavy metal.

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To get rid of the blending, the easiest way is to put the shadow type on "Ray Traced", then under Shadow Parameters turn the Desnsity up to like 1000, that will give you a pure black shadow. (If you want a colored shadow, use the Color swatch right next to it).

Last, make sure that anti-aliasing is off in the render propertities.

It is true that if you use Raytraced shadows you get less blending, but you need to remove anti-aliasing to eliminate it.
Turning of anti-aliasing in the render properties is not recommended because your weapons will look really ugly, especially if you use low resolution.
You may have noticed that even the weapons blend with your background. You can solve this by doing the following: Go to Customize>Preferences>Rendering and turn on Don''t Anti-alias Against Background. This will stop objects blending with your background but they will be anti-aliased.
Unfortunately, the shadow blends with the box (the one with the Matte/Shadow material) and not with the background...

I still think that my first solution is better...

Bye now. Must go and listen to some heavy metal.