How can I get overlapping translucent sprites to keep the same opacity?

Question

I have two simple translucent circle sprites that I'm using as fake shadows (shown below) under some characters (not shown below). When the characters get close enough, sometimes their shadow circles can overlap - which is fine - but thanks to the default blending it doesn't look right. I want the shadow circles that do overlap to be visually merged/mixed so they maintain the same opacity, but instead they add together where they overlap like this:

I have to imagine there's some way to make this work with a shader, but I'm so bad at shaders that I can't seem to figure it out. Does anyone know how to solve this?

Comments

Not sure if it's a solution or not, but if you create a new CanvasItemMaterial for the sprite, you can set the Blend Mode on the material. I'm really not that familiar with the available modes, but maybe you can get the result you want?

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I gave that a try. Add and Sub both rendered a blank shadow - couldn't even see it. Mul rendered a black rectangle instead for some reason. And Premult Alpha seemed to render the exact same way as Mix. So no dice there.

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Also, found this related thread:

https://godotforums.org/d/24241-combine-low-opacity-sprites-shadows-into-one

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That's an interesting thread and seems to be the exact problem I'm having here. I noticed there's some final comment on there from 2021 speculating that Godot 4 will have something called a CanvasGroup which might solve this - although that doesn't help me at all since I'm still on 3.5. Thanks for the link, though.

Answer 1

In a fragment shader you can force the alpha value to be constant. You can input the value as a float uniform and apply this value to the output COLOR.a value.

Comments

My shadow texture essentially has a constant alpha as it is. A constant alpha in a shader wouldn't change anything would it? I think the core cause of this problem is that it draws every shadow sprite separately and then has to somehow mix them together when compositing or something like that.