Well, its more of a hack than anything else and maybe it has been done before but I’m not sure so I thought I would share:
It basically uses a baked shadow map which is then used as a ‘texture’ in a spot light. The spotlight is then parented to the object and positioned above it looking straight down. The spotlight then has its energy turned down to a negative number, say -8.00 or whatever suits the scene.
This has a few inaccuracies namely the fact that the shadow appears to shrink the closer the object is to it because the spotlight ‘projects’ from a single point as opposed to say, a sun light.
But for my purposes it works well:
