Options for drop shadows

[Lin Evans]

A couple observations. There have been numerous times when I've needed to remove a drop shadow during an animation. The only work-around so far has been to duplicate the area of the slide using PNG and transparency, overlay this and use keyframed opacity to "correct".. Being able to "keyframe" drop shadows would be a significant improvement.

The other "niggle" is that opacity appears to be "additive." By this I mean that if you have a shadow on an object with another object also having a shadow in close proximity, the two shadows "add" their opacity values and with a number of these in proximity, it creates a very "dark" and ugly shadow.

A recent example was using drop shadows on Venetian Blind simulations. As the blinds were raised, the cumulative effect of shadows from three or more shadowed objects created an extremely dark shadow under the last shade which followed it as it rose to the valance. If there were an "option" for drop shadows to not be additive, then the animation would look correct. As it is, so far I've found no viable work-around. It's either not have the shadows on the blinds, or have the dark additive shadow underneath.

Best regards,

Lin

[xahu34]

Keypoints for shadows have been asked for by user thedom quite a long time ago (here), and I think that it would be fine to have them. I sometimes place a rectangle (no Edge antialiasing) behind an image (combined with a parent/child construction), and assign the shadow to the rectangle. In cases where the image is part of a bigger one using a mask, the situation is less fine, as the shadow providing rectangle has to sit outside the mask container. This is the reason why I made a suggestion only a few days ago (here).

Regards,

Xaver