Baking Shadows

[bvlly]

Hey! I am making a shoebox as a decoration, but I am having a hard time finding out how to bake transparent shadow textures. Any help on this? I'm using blender 2.8 as well.

 

Thanks in advance!

[Aquila Kytori]

Unfortunately, as far as I know This is a 2 step process.

First Bake out the shadows on the ground plane. (Note: the image to bake to can be quite small, for a shoebox a 128 x 128 or 256 x 256 would probabaly be plenty big enough).

 

 

Next use the Compositor to Convert the white to Alpha. (This could also be done using Gimp or Photoshop instead).

1. Open the Compositor.
2. Enable Use Nodes.
3. Delete the default nodes and then add an Image node, an Invert node and a Viewer node. Connect the 3 nodes as shown in the screenshot below.
4. From the Image node select the baked shadow texture.
5. Select the Viewer node. (If you don't select this node the Viewer Node option may not show up in the list in the next step).
6. In the UV editor from the Image dropdown list choose the Viewer Node.
7. Save this image: Image > Save As............. and save as a   .png   with  RGBA option enabled.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 19, 2020 by Aquila Kytori