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Soft shadows look like hard (with cascades). Why?

Discussion in 'General Graphics' started by ekergraphics, Jun 20, 2017.

  1. ekergraphics

    ekergraphics

    Joined:
    Feb 22, 2017
    Posts:
    257
    I even tried to force the quality mode, but I still get this. It looks as if it lacks filtering (from point light):

    Capture.JPG
     
  2. bgolus

    bgolus

    Joined:
    Dec 7, 2012
    Posts:
    12,329
    That looks like a shadow from a point light. Point lights don't use cascades, only the main (aka brightest) shadowing directional light. Unity's point lights are effectively multiple jittered hard edged shadows as many old platforms didn't support cubemap based soft shadows. Instead of implementing multiple setups for point light shadows (like they do for directional lights), Unity opted to only implement one that worked on all platforms.

    There are shadow softener assets available on the store that increase / randomize the jittered samples which can look a lot better, but are generally slower. Valve's The Labs renderer implemented point light shadows as 6 separate spotlight shadows (which is how many modern engines do it!), and I believe Unity's upcoming future renderer using their Scriptable Render Loop will have a proper modern solution as well, but until then you're stuck with crunchy shadows... unless you want to rewrite the shadowing code on your own and not use any of Unity's built in shaders or shadowing systems.
     
  3. ekergraphics

    ekergraphics

    Joined:
    Feb 22, 2017
    Posts:
    257
    I see. Thank you for the information!

    I shall look to the asset store then.