can you Cast transparent cutout shadows but dont render the object ?

Hi,

I have a long fence in my scene and i want to use a transparency shader but only the cutout versions cast shadows, the cutout shader does not look good enough ingame as it goes into the distance so i plan on using a proxy version of the fence to cast the shadow and render the version of the fence that has the full transparency shader on it.

Is it possible to make a transparent cutout shader that casts a shadow but is not visible to the camera ? if so can somebody point me in the direction of how to do it ? I am an artists so pls keep and code talk simple

I have looked around to see if anyone has asked this before and i have seen some posts where the object casts a shadow but does not render however i need it to be cast through the alpha texture of the object and so far i cant find any examples.

thanks,

 

If you draw the fence using a pure white texture, with shadows, then you can drawn the colored fence on top of it in multiply blend mode?

 

I guess the easiest way would be to set the ColorMask to 0 in the standard rendering pass. And then don't forget to fallback to another cutout shader for the shadows.