I've converted the UFO from TS2 and put it into TS3 as a 'car', which looks nifty except that its ground shadow is still that of a rectangular car shape. There's no Group within the TS3 car I cloned from's mesh for a ground shadow, so I can't change the shape of the shadow that way, as I normally do for furniture. Does anyone know if it's possible to change a car's shadow, and if so, how? Thanks!

That shadow is the outdoor shadow and the lod's that begin with 1 control those (ie: 10000001, 10000000) and not the shadow group in the main object meshes. Cars must have those too right? In MS they look alot like giant black blobs.

Thank you very much, HL, for the speedy reply. Well, I'm stumped by this - in the car I cloned, there are only three MLOD/MODL files, and none of them begins with 1 - they're 00000000, 00010000 and 00000001. But a strange thing is that I know this cloned car CAN generate a correct shadow, because I used the same car to create this:

As you can see, it did generate a more appropriate shadow for that object. I'm beginning to wonder, is it because the UFO is bigger than the car, whereas the dragon is smaller - would a new object being bigger than the cloned object mess up its ability to generate a new correct shadow?

Oh sorry, I forgot where the 1 was in the number. The 0x00010000 is the sunshadow mesh. Did you adjust that mesh at all? I'm guessing you did for the dragon since it displays a relatively close shadow, but I don't want to assume you did for the UFO as well but well - things get forgotten. If you did you could try making it smaller to see if there is a size limitation causing it to cut off.

For both the UFO and the dragon, I copied the same .obj mesh of the UFO to all three of the MLOD/MODL meshes. Do you mean I should make a scaled-down version of my UFO .obj that fits within the size of the original car, and just copy that to the 00010000 mesh? Does the 00010000 mesh only generate the sunshadow, is that its only purpose? Sorry but I am a n00b at object creation and don't yet understand the technicalities of what everything does - the only reason I've been able to make a few items successfully is sheer luck rather than actually having a clue what I'm doing, ha ha! It would be great if what you're saying is that I just need to make the 00010000 mesh smaller in order to generate the correct shaped shadow, and not have to make the whole UFO itself smaller. I will give that a try!

Yes the 00010000 is solely for generating the sunshadow and should be a lower poly version, basically the outline shape. And it normally is larger and offset from the original mesh. Since TSRW calculates this based on your mesh it must be a calculated value for offset. Not sure of what values they use to offset it, but it sits below and off to the right (?) of the main mesh. I was only thinking making it smaller to see if it is using your mesh to display the sunshadow. Because if it is round when shrinking it then it may be a bounding box issue or maybe the footprint. I'm guessing the footprint hasn't changed? So the sunshadow could be limited by that.

Oh dear God, you're right, that worked! I made a copy of the UFO mesh small enough to fit inside the car, and this was the result. Thank you so much for the explanation of how the sunshadow mesh works.

The only problem is the shadow is now oval rather than round, but it is correct otherwise, as you can see the shape of the tail lights and the windows that go all around the UFO. Maybe what I need to try next is to make the sunshadow mesh oval at a 90 degree angle to the orientation of the current shadow, and see if that makes the shadow come out round. Hooray, nearly there (hopefully!) - thank you again!

Woot! From what I've seen on objects the sunshadow meshes are also not the same proportions. They tend to be more box like even if your original mesh is rectangular. I think the size and shape of the sunshadow is also somewhat dependent on the time of day in game.

Ah, OK then, maybe an oval shadow is the best we can do? After all, I guess the game wasn't coded to deal with the concept of big round 'cars'! Would that shadow be considered acceptable for upload? I ran the game for a few sim hours and the shadow stayed oval at all times of the day, sometimes it was off to the left or right rather than centred depending on the time of day, but was always that same oval shape.

I would think yes, if you made it so that it doesn't get cut off. I notice at the front, or is that the back?! that it is still cut off square. Having the shadow under smaller seems logical to me since the space ship is going to be floating, but then again I may not be the best person to talk about logical. LoL And a round/oval shadow is better than nothing and a huge improvement to rectangular.

Thanks, I'll try to improve the shadow so that it doesn't have that square bit at the front, maybe I need to make the shadow mesh smaller still. Thank you again for your help!!