shadow texture

I need to add the shadow to the objects . So, I found one way in sunglasses tutorial that we can have an environment object with a material which has shadow texture .
The first question is how can I have that kind of texture ( I dont mean the green channel, I mean the original shadow ) for the objects ? Do I need to bake them somewhere?
Another way is by turning off/on the shadow cast and receive of the object and the surface, but how I can have the white environment everywhere even when I want to look at the objects from bottom view (because now, with the surface I can not have the same effect as we have with environment cube in sunglesses tutorial)?

Yes, for the first method you need to bake the shadow. Mikhail used Cycles engine for that. He made a quick tutorial video:

Also you might consider baking Ambient Occlusion

This method works well and fast if the scene has static objects. If they are changing or moving though, you'll need to use dynamic shasows. For the environment I recommend using Sky color, just enable "Render Sky" option and set the color to white.




P.S.
I highly recommend using only one or two lamps in the scene, it will greatly boost the performance of the scene,

Hope it helps!

Thank you for the tutorial and explaination, It was really helpful.

Could you please indicate how can I have dynamic shadows in the scene?

Thanks again

Here I made a video, quite some time ago

This enables dynamic shadows. You can control its behaviour via Shadows panel under the Render tab.

well, what I meant was to have shadows moving around the object comsiderimg the light source in the fast preview .

You mean this kind of behaviour?

shadow.html

shad.blend

this kind of behaviour but not exactly like this (automatically). I want to have this kind of shadow in the way that I start to rotate the scene in the fast preview and the shadows change the directions with this rotaion. I hope you get what I mean !

Oh I see. Yes, for it you need to parent the light source to the camera

shadow.html

shad.blend

Hello,

I have created dynamic shadow by parenting the light source (hemi) to the camera, in adittion, I have a spot light on top that is not parented and make some part of shadow lighter. I need to chande the shadow effect. How can I have a shadow in gradient ?! in the way that shadow starts from dark shadow and disappear gradually in the atmosphere? (here I have the opposite effect)

I have created dynamic shadow by parenting the light source (hemi) to the camera, in adittion, I have a spot light on top that is not parented and make some part of shadow lighter. I need to chande the shadow effect. How can I have a shadow in gradient ?! in the way that shadow starts from dark shadow and disappear gradually in the atmosphere? (here I have the opposite effect)

Hi, You can't control a shadow dyrectly, but for your scene you can create a simple plane with the transparent boarder that will discrease influence of the shadow. Here's an example for you. shadow_example.blend