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I'm somewhat new to Blender so please keep that in mind when providing any answers as I'll probably even need directions to where I could find various settings or menu items. I'm using Cycles Render and I have a really simple scene setup. I have a plane, a cube, a light and a camera. The plane is using a PNG texture that has some transparency to it on the sides. You can see a screenshot of everything bellow:

enter image description here

What I'm trying to achieve is to bake the shadow the cube is creating on my plane into the plane's texture. The way that I've tried it is the following: I first make sure I have my Image Texture selected inside the node editor and then I press the Bake button. The result can be seen bellow:

enter image description here

As you can see the shadow from the cube does appear properly however the transparency the texture used to have on the sides is replaced with a darker gray. How can I avoid this? I would like to keep the areas with the transparency my original texture had and simply just add the shadow on top of it WITHOUT loosing the transparency.

Thanks so much in advance!

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  • $\begingroup$ Just in case someone else ran into a similar situation, I did find a way around it, however I do hope that there is a better solution through Blender. What you can do is simply save the new texture that doesn't have any transparency as a JPG or PNG and then inside a software like Photoshop you can have the previous texture act as a mask to the new one, hence adding back the transparency areas. The issue with this solution is that it's a bit difficult to pull off when you have more complicated textures like grass, as the background color in the transparency areas will still be slightly visible. $\endgroup$
    – stefanplc
    Commented Dec 21, 2015 at 16:17
  • $\begingroup$ maybe you have to check the transparant option in de film tab in the render panel $\endgroup$
    – gladys
    Commented Dec 21, 2015 at 18:51
  • $\begingroup$ that just makes the background black instead of a dark gray in the areas where transparency is supposed to to be $\endgroup$
    – stefanplc
    Commented Dec 21, 2015 at 21:16
  • $\begingroup$ I think the answer to your question might be the same one you can find in the following Q&A: Can I bake glass BSDF? $\endgroup$
    – Athit See
    Commented Jul 21, 2021 at 5:30

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I ended up finding a way around this. Basically I would bake only my shadows to a separate image and then manually add them to my textures with Photoshop. It requires the extra step, but I ended up liking it even more this way because I can adjust the shadows some more.

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