Can smoke receive shadows in Eevee on 2.8?

Question

I have a shot with an object in silhouette against a spotlight with volumetric lighting and a smoke simulation.

With Eevee is there a way to have the smoke simulation receive the shadow of an object suspended in the smoke from the spotlight?

Would try this in Cycles but I'm working remotely on a MBP right now and my machine sits on the first eight sample squares for 30 minutes so even rendering a single frame to evaluate the result is prohibitively expensive.

Have tried the following and non of them result in shadows:

Render Tab:

• volumetric shadows

Spot Light:

• shadow settings contact shadow settings

Here is a link to a blend file that demonstrates the question. In the actual file I have text instead of a sphere, so in this .blend there is placeholder text in place:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/azj00xfp5y9dl1r/Stinger_SEShare.blend?dl=0

Answer 1

It actually is working in your file, but with such wide spot lights it's invisible/too subtle to see. As you can see, even with cycles it's not visible:

This is because there's still plenty of light being scattered from behind and in front of the object's shadow; in comparison the amount of light being blocked becomes insignificant:

If you add a larger object, casting a larger shadow, you can start to see the effect. Narrowing the light cone also works.

However, you may run into problems with the shadow resolution being too low, especially with small objects. Make sure the global shadow resolution is sufficient in Properties > Render > Shadows:

Other common problematic shadow settings are the Clip Start on the lamp's shadow settings (make sure that isn't too large) and too much Softness, which can eat narrow shadows (like those cast by text). With 0 softness you get nice crisp text shadows: