Oh, no! With the grid down for repair, I've been reading the SL newsletters and the like, and stumbled across the portfolio of Aimee Weber. Okay, so from what I gather she's really well known in SL, but I guess I don't get out of the sandbox often enough; it's the first time I'd heard of her.
Oh. My. God. From what she says on the page linked from the image above, she uses "baked textures" (i.e. the shadows are part of the textures themselves). That is absolutely phenomenal and I MUST LEARN HOW TO DO IT!
Once the grid comes back up, I have to visit the American Apparel store she built; apparently it swaps textures based on the time of day, so that it's lit up with floodlights at night (with shadows on the walls changing to reflect the changing light sources).
My guess is that she must reproduce her builds exactly in an external 3D application, texture and light them the way she wants them to look, then render at least a couple of passes for each wall/floor/cabinet/etc. (one for the base textures, with the furniture removed; and another one for the shadow maps with the furniture present), then combine the passes into a single image and apply them to the SL objects.
Although... in searching through the LSL Wiki for something else, I did run across this function, which includes a mouth-watering flag name: STATUS_CAST_SHADOWS — "PREVIEW: If set, object casts shadows on other objects (if shadows are enabled)" Looks like it's time to try out the preview grid!
(As if I don't already have enough things on my SL "To Do" list, and RL Boyfriend isn't already feeling neglected as it is... If only I could get him sucked into SL too!)
