Drop Shadow of MeshInstance2D?

[ruffemotion]

Godot Version

4.4 RC3

Question

To my surprise, I cannot find a working way of adding a shadow to my MeshInstance2D with SphereMesh in it. I simply want something like this:

I’ve tried this shader (and various other shaders on GodotShaders), but sadly it doesn’t work as advertised for me: 2D shadows shader (v2) - Godot Shaders

Is there a working solution for drop shadows with the basic controls, like XY offset, size, blur and color?

Thank you!

[Luka_Dev]

You need to add this shader to Sprite2D, if you add it to any other node, shader will not work as you suspected.

[ruffemotion]

So, the problem is - If I were to use Sprite2D, then I need it to work on a MeshTexture with a Mesh in it, as far as I understand - Sprite2D → MeshTexture is completely broken in Godot 4, it just does not render at all.

[Luka_Dev]

1. Add Sprite2D, add texture to it.
2. Convert it to MeshInstance2D, and setup it.
   (Select Sprite2D → Editor will show button with title Sprite2D near the “View” and “Skeleton options” buttons → Click → Convert to MeshInstace2d)
3. Add material with shader to your new MeshInstance2D

If I run the game, all MeshInstace2D will render with shader shadows.

[ruffemotion]

Unfortunately using raster images won’t work in my case. You see, I’m creating an audio visualizer and the peaks are made from MeshInstance2D → Mesh → CapsuleMesh, because in Godot there are no 2D vector primitives for some reason, but there are 3D ones I can use with MeshInstance2D. So these peaks react to sound, it’s an audio visualizer. I mean, it’s technically possible to create something similar with raster graphics I guess, but that’s a dirty-hacky approach, so I don’t want to do it like that. I want to keep is simple and parametric. Thanks for your tips though, but I’m afraid they are not applicable in my case.