Sounds awesome dude!

Yeah, it'd be cool if someone tried to mod it. Especially considering the game has it when you drive vehicles -it's hard to see, but when using any vehicle (even small ones like a bike or a quad) the game still renders Sam's body and drops his shadow on the environment.

I wonder why Croteam didn't include at least player shadow in the game. First person animations require some work (and we all know how rushed and incomplete SS4 is) and I can understand not implementing it, but player shadow should be really easy - any modern engine can drop shadows from entities that aren't rendered in first person. It's very very common nowadays, "flying camera with hands" looks really weird when you have dynamic shadows and eye-level lights that drop nice long shadows (indoors or when at dawn etc). I wonder if it's moddable.

A problem I can see if they did render your model's shadow in first-person would be that first-person weapons do receive world shadows, so the third-person model would be casting mis-matching shadows on the weapon.

Now, when you're on a vehicle, it does legitimately use the third-person model for holding the handlebars/wheel, while any weapons drawn in first-person are a first-person model. It avoids the shadow issue by having a unique set of animations for the third-person model when viewed in first-person, where the right arm is retracted completely when holding a weapon, instead of swinging around like the third-person animations. You can still see the shadow of your character's head and body on the weapon, but that pretty much matches up exactly where you'd expect your body to be.

Originally posted by Ryason55:

A problem I can see if they did render your model's shadow in first-person would be that first-person weapons do receive world shadows, so the third-person model would be casting mis-matching shadows on the weapon.

Now, when you're on a vehicle, it does legitimately use the third-person model for holding the handlebars/wheel, while any weapons drawn in first-person are a first-person model. It avoids the shadow issue by having a unique set of animations for the third-person model when viewed in first-person, where the right arm is retracted completely when holding a weapon, instead of swinging around like the third-person animations. You can still see the shadow of your character's head and body on the weapon, but that pretty much matches up exactly where you'd expect your body to be.

It's way less noticeable than no shadow at all. I'm pretty sure in Destiny the first person weapon model actually do receive shadows from the third person model. It looks weird in some edge cases if you are really looking for it - you can see shadow of the hand with the gun from player character dropping on the foreground gun when using one-handed weapons.
Or they could make foreground models do not receive shadow from third person model at all.
I mean there is like a myriad of solutions, but they decided to go the "flying camera" route for walking and combine it with vehicles. It could have been implemented universally the same way it works with vehicles though - most games doesn't use third person animations for foreground weapon, they use third person model for shadows, part of the third person model for legs, and first person models for hands. It didn't match that well, but you won't ever notice if you aren't exactly looking for it. Croteam just didn't bothered with first person view for some reason. Which I find strange, when they already have a working solution already implemented in-game. Especially since lately "flying camera" is dying trope, more and more games started to include player shadow for the sole reason of immersion even when it's not needed for gameplay reasons.