Blender trasparent texture

Hi, today I'm here with a simple but really useful tip: using transparent textures on planes (but also other meshes) in blender.
First of all I wanna say that I discovered this method here.
I'm working with blender 2.66 but I think it works fine in 2.5x or higher.
Here is the final result:

To reach this result follow these steps in order:
1)create your plane (or other mesh)
2)create a new material for this object

3) active transparency and set alpha value (optional: also specular value)  to 0

4)in the texture panel create a new texture and set as type "image or movie"
5)load your image
6)under Influence tick alpha and leave its value to 1.0

7)Optional: to make the image fit the plane: under texture panel, in image mapping set "clip" instead of "repeat"

8)Now it you try rendering you will see that shadows made by your plane aren't of the same shape of your  texture; to make them follow your image you will have to change settings in the object that RECEIVE the shadows.
In the material panel, under shadow, tick "receive transparent".

I hope you like this post, if you have any question please comment or send me an email to damianoandre@gmail.com

Bye, Dami