[adrian-andrzjewski]

Fixes #1875

What changed

• Run render controls for shadow casters and their ancestor chain before rendering each shadow map.
• Temporarily clear and restore the forced shadow material and technique so controls can prepare casters with their own materials while the shadow camera is active.
• Add regression coverage for shared ancestors and one control callback per shadow pass.

Validation

• :jme3-core:test: 1,216 tests, 0 failures, 0 errors, 1 skipped.
• Runtime reproduction using the migrated Jaime model and SpotLightShadowRenderer: the caster was outside the main camera frustum, was queued for the shadow map, and its render control ran 89 times over 90 frames (RTX 2060 SUPER).

[jaime-jmebot]

Hi Adrian, thanks for putting this fix together. The change addresses the shadow-only caster path directly: it runs render controls for queued casters and their ancestors with the shadow camera active, while deduplicating shared ancestors within a pass, and restores the render manager’s forced material and technique even if a control throws.

I reviewed the helper and its call site alongside the regression tests. The identity-based set is a good fit for scene-graph spatials, and creating it per invocation ensures controls can run again on the next shadow pass. The tests cover both shared-parent deduplication and repeated callbacks across separate passes, and the material/technique restoration is protected by finally, which is important for leaving subsequent rendering state intact.

Looks good to me. Thanks for including both regression coverage and a runtime reproduction!

[riccardobl]

Is this something you need in your use case?
I suspect this can be a breaking change for some applications.