Per Object Shadow Distance?

Hello Unity community!

Is it possible to set shadow distance per object? I want only my terrain to cast a long distance dynamic shadow. All my other other objects (enemies, Rocks, Trees) can have a much lower shadow distance.

The only way I have thought to achieve this is to increase my global shadow distance in quality settings, and turn shadow casting on and off per object (enemy, Rock, tree) based on OnTriggerEnter/Exit. However, this would require a very large number of Trigger calls and I think there should be a more performant way to achieve this.

 

What's the objective here? an optimisation or a visual effect?

 

Anthony,

The objective is to have the Terrain Render shadows from a very large distance. This shadow needs to be Dynamic as I have a day/night cycle. The other objects should only render when they are close to the Player.

 

Thank you, but I am not using Baked GI, because I have a day/night cycle (the directional light revolves around the terrain). I need my terrain to cast a dynamic shadow which is visible form very large distances. Since it is only 1 object, performance is not too bad even with very large shadow distance. However, all of my other objects, such as rocks and trees and enemies, also need to cast dynamic shadows which should only be visible from up close. Is there a way to set visible shadow distance per object? Please advise. thank you

 

If you are looking to increase the quality of the shadow at large distances, you should change the Resolution property (under Shadow Type) to Very High Resolution.

You can also make your directional light only affect the Terrain layer (you will need to add a Terrain layer, of course). Then set that light to have Render Mode: Important, and the light that affects everything else as Not Important. This is not a solution I have tested, however.

 

Hello Craig, thank you for you suggestion. My shadow resolution is already set to very high but the quality of the shadow is still very blurry when I set the shadow distance to 2000. It only looks sharp only when I set shadow distance to 100 or lower.

Creating 2 Dynamic lights seems like a plausible solution. One for the terrain, and another for all objects. But how would I set my other objects (Boulders, enemies, player) to cast shadows only within a short distance form the player? The shadow distance in quality settings is a global setting. how can I change the shadow distance per directional light?

 

Easiest way is just to use the LOD Group component and make your LOD1/LOD2 mesh not cast shadows (Mesh Renderer component). You could even use the same mesh for both LOD's. The LOD component just switches different mesh renderers on/off.

Another way is to script your own collision-based shadow remover, or have a script that is calculating their distance to the camera and switching the shadows on/off.

 

Hey, i would like to reopen this questions.

We would like to have:
- realtime shadows close to the camera for every object - distance shadowmask
- baked shadows for static objects
- realtime shadows for dynamic objects (! this is what I am up to !)

Is it somehow possible please?

I wonder if anyone who works on fly simulator doesnt need it?

 

Try the Subtractive mode.

 

For the record, I went with Stardog's suggestion of turning off shadow casting after a certain distance from the player, using a sphere trigger collider. This seems to be the cheapest/most efficient solution.

I don't remember the exact syntax off the top of my head, but its something like:

void OnTriggerExit()
{
Mesh.ShadowCastingMode= false;
}

void OnTriggerEnter()
{
Mesh.ShadowCastingMode= true;
}