Help Fixing Light And Shadow Cast From A Animated 2d Character Texture With An Alpha Layer

[darth-caboose]

I'm an animation student specialising in CG with maya, on a mostly 2d animation production course. I have an environment made in maya with things such as foglights. My colleague at the moment is drawing up some 2d character animation which he is going to scan and give an alpha layer so that all that is left is the character. Basically the problem is, i can setup animated textures and the foglight fine, however the shadow cast is not by that of the character but by that of the plane the 2d character is on.[/b] Below is an example of what i mean. If sumone can help me or point me in the right direction of a good tutorial it would be most apreciated (keeping in consideration this will be a larrge amount of frames of animation and in maya software for the fog to work).

[joojaa]

Thet is how the dmap shadows work, you can use mentalray and use detail shadows or gebnerate the dmap shadow manually witha extra render and furthest z with some good treshold anbd point the dmap handler to that.

Or convert a shadow proxy with texture to geometry.

Or ray trace using a ray marcher.