Railworks America

From what i've read here and on Facebook, shadow models and the StencilShadow.fx shader will be dropped for Railworks 3 in favor of shadows generated by the game engine. My question is what happens to the shadow models on already present assets? If they protrude outside of the main asset, will they become visible? For example, road signs and signal hoods are flat planes - any shadow model has to be placed somewhere outside the asset. So without the shadow shader, will the shadow model be visible?

If this is the case, I ( and a few other modelers ) are going to have to go back and strip the shadows out of more than a few assets.

IIRC, the old shadows are totally ignored.

How do you set things up so that your model cast shadows on themselves then?

Don't know if that is necessary now. By all accounts, the game engine should take care of throwing shadows now. I've begun building new assets without shadows now.

Ben told me on UKTS that it just happens. You will still need to bake shading in, I don't think it deals with reflections & so on ( it'd be wonderful if it did, but I don't think most of us could afford the gigantic graphics processing array needed to do realtime raytracing... ).