[General] How do shadow textures work?

[Antares]

I'm trying to recreate unit and destructable shadows using the image natives. If I create an image with one of the shadow textures you find in the mpq, such as

"ReplaceableTextures\\Shadows\\ShadowCastle.blp"

I get a black square instead of a nice-looking shadow, so there's something missing. Are the unit shadows models and not images? Are there textures hidden somewhere that I can use for the image natives?

 

[Chaosium]

If you apply the texture to a standard plane with transparency, you get this:

Don't ask me what the red dot is, apparently all shadows have this thing, but basically yeah this is the castle shadow and it doesn't look good

 

[Dr Super Good]

Don't ask me what the red dot is, apparently all shadows have this thing, but basically yeah this is the castle shadow and it doesn't look good

The red dot might have something to do with positioning the shadow, such as being the 0,0 origin for the shadow.

 

[Antares]

So, what am I to do? Should I create the shadow models myself from these weird things? Could write a script for it.

 

[Dr Super Good]

I do not think Warcraft III uses shadow models in this context...

The way the image natives work probably is not compatible with the shadow maps. You might need to extract them, convert them, edit them and then convert them back so they are in a format that plays well with the image natives. This is assuming the image natives support transparency.

 

[Antares]

They do.