Bug No Shadows in Asset Bundles or Standalone builds!

Hey there. We're currently developing a Quest 2 / PC title in URP. We're on Unity 2021.2.19f1, using URP 12.1.6.

When building with Asset Bundles, it seems all shaders related to shadows are getting stripped from builds. If I go into the URP Global Settings and disable all shader stripping, the shadow-variants no longer get stripped, but of course then our builds take an enormous amount of time.

I believe this is a URP bug, because our Quality settings for PC/Consoles has a separate URP Renderer Asset slotted in. To be safe, our default Graphics setting's URP Renderer is the PC version, which has shadows-variants enabled in the settings.

We are using a lot of custom shaders and using a custom asset bundle managing solution, so maybe we're hitting something weird. But aside from disabling URP stripping entirely I haven't been able to get shadows in builds (they DO work in editor - unless I'm just loading asset bundles from the editor - in which case they also do not work, because it seems they've been stripped from bundles too).

Is there any workaround for this that does not involve waiting hours for shaders to compile every time? Thanks.


Some notes:

• Looking in the Frame Debugger, shadows ARE rendering. However, all materials in the game are NOT sampling from them.
• Despite the frame debugger claiming that the shader variant keywords are in use, they definitely are not because it does not show the shadowmap textures.

URP Global Settings:



Unity's Quality Settings


URP Renderer for PC quality:

 

Bug report submitted with our whole project: Case 1422243

 

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Hello. Did you find a solution?

 

Due to how URP shader stripping works it, you have to have some URP asset and renderer data asset (with the settings you need for your shaders) assigned to either main graphics settings or quality levels overrides and have these assets available at the build time. I'm guessing these assets going into asset bundle (?) could make the shader preprocessor think they don't exist and it strips those variants away that you actually needed.

So alternatives to fix this would be: have at least one URP asset + renderer data asset assigned at build time that use the shader features you need.

Or use custom URP package that and modify it's ShaderPreProcessor.cs so it doesn't set shadow pass stripping to true on places where it checks that (there seems to be several places for those checks there).

 

No, I submitted a bug ages ago but Unity has yet to actually do anything about it, it seems.

I've ran over it a bunch of time but can't find anything that should cause it to be stripped from builds. Turning off stripping has been our temporary solution to getting shadows, but finding whats actually causing it to be stripped has been the pain point for sure.

 

Any luck with this? We're facing the same issues - to solve it so far we've been adding hidden objects to our scenes that contain the necessary shaders... which isn't great obviously.

 

Nope, I'm still waiting too!

 

Same issue,I have tried add some lit materials to the shader bundle,not worked.

 

They closed my bug report without actually fixing it. Wow.

 

Can confirm this issue still exist even after 2022.2.5

 

I had the same issue and the workaround you mentioned by disabling strip shaders worked for me, thank you. My build time didn't increase so I'll be using this for now.