Over the weekend I was working out how to tear a piece of paper in Blender and stumbled on the annoying but easily solvable issue of transparency shadows.
By default a material will not receive shadows based on the texture but on the geometry of an object. As seen here:
To fix this, go to the receiving material’s proprieties and click “Receive Transparent.”
Now the shadows are based on the texture:
A simple fix, but if you are coming from a 3d software using clip maps or settings on the texture this can be a bit difficult to find. I will be taking a closer look on how this effect is best used and if it affects render times in a later post.