Let Shadows Point in a Direction (rotation and stretching)

Why is this important?

Creating striking dawn/dusk maps with dramatic shadows currently takes a ton of manual work per stamp. Realistically only "super users" have the patience for it, leaving everyone else with flat, “boring” shadows 😥. I also love using the option for solid (non-blurred) shadows, but often, that just makes things look wrong, like they're floating instead of grounded.

Why should you consider it?

I think this feels totally doable with some basic transform math + object cloning behind the scenes. I mocked it up by hand for the examples below. It'd let way more users create striking, fast directional lighting without needing pro-level tricks :)

What could this look like?

• Simplest version: a rotate slider + squish/stretch transform sliders added to the shadow options. Lets users align a shadow to an object's base and stretch it toward the light source for that dramatic sunrise/sunset look — without extra work for stamp makers or over complicating the feature.

• For battlemaps (top-down view) this breaks down for things like trees; aligning + stretching to the base gives the shadow the wrong origin point. Fix: an optional mask, centered on the stamp, positioned opposite the shadow's rotation angle, that hides the part of the shadow that the object itself would be blocking.

  • The mask should probably default to centered on the stamp, but a stretch goal could be letting users nudge its origin point manually.

Visual examples: