alpha tile and doodad shadows

[darwin]

I made a beautiful map with the alpha tile and some fancy doodads. Everything was great until I calculated shadows and saved the map. Doodads started casting shadows over the alphaed areas and instead of being see through they are now shaded (some are black, some appear grey).

I panicked and immediately set all the doodads to have no shadow, and all the destructibles to have "none" for shadow texture. I then recalculated shadows and saved. But for some reason the ugly shading that makes some doodads invisible and greyed out aren't going away.

How do I get doodads and destructibles to actually stop having shadows over alpha?

[EDIT]

UPDATE: I appear to have misdiagnosed the problem. The shadows aren't coming from doodads, they care coming from the terrain itself! The alphaed out sections (mostly cliffs that are underneath castle walls) are casting shadows on themselves.

Is there any way to get terrain to stop casting shadows, or do I have to flatten everything out, save shadows, and then redo it?

 

[Zwiebelchen]

This is unavoidable with the alpha tile; the only way to solve this is to fix the shadow map problem manually.
If you want to be clever, you can use the Shadowmap converter to extract and save your calculated shadowmap as an image, then also extract the file that contains the tile information (don't know what it's called) as an image.
Load the tile file into photoshop or gimp and only select the pixels that have the color that represents your alpha tile. You can then save the selection shape and load it into your shadow map image and remove the shadow pixels on those parts.
Then convert the file back into the shadow map and add it back to your map MPQ.

 

[darwin]

That sounds a bit beyond my abilities. Also, if I change the MPQ, would others who download the campaign get those changes?

My current plan is just to never compute shadows... the map still looks very good and I'm not sure it would be noticed. When I'm completely done with the map, I may try flattening out the terrain near the alphaed areas, computing shadows (hopefully there won't be any) and then redoing that part of the terrain. I'm suspicious that this won't work, but I suppose it's worth a try.

Thanks for the help though.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Delete the shadow map file. If it errors due to a lack of it (should not, I think people proved this before that no shadow map will cause no error) then import a blank shadow map from a blank map. The shadow map is "war3map.shd" and you can extract/replace it using MPQEdit on a un-damaged version of the map.

 

[Zwiebelchen]

When I said MPQ, I basicly meant the map file, not the actual MPQs.

The explanation looks a lot more difficult than it actually is. What you do, basicly, is editing the shadowmap manually with an image software like Paint. There's a converter tool for that; all you need to do is extracting, editing and saving again. No witchcraft and you'll learn something about the internal file structure of WC3 at the same time.

 

[darwin]

This definitely seems like what I should do. I think I'll finish the map completely though; make sure all the doodads are in place and so forth, then come back to this thread and give it a shot.

Thanks guys.

 

[Zwiebelchen]

Yes, it's definitely a good idea to only do this once your map is finished. Calculating shadows takes days for big maps.