"Reduced additional punctual light shadows resolution" message after Upgrading to 2021.1.15

This worked for me. I was a bit confused because there were no other packages in the folder and I didn't have a universal renderer folder, just the standard. But copied this com.unity.renderpipeliines.... to Packages inside the Project folder and lo and behold, my commenting out the Debug messages now works and isn't getting overridden. I now have a functioning console again. Thanks!.

 

Just started getting these errors out of the blue in the game.
Debugging package code suggests URP is trying to calculate shadow information for all lights, including baked ones, even when additional lights and shadows are disabled across the board in all tickboxes possible.
Which seems weird to me...

Code (CSharp):

1.   AdditionalLightsShadowCasterPass.IsValidShadowCastingLight

doesn't take any of those into consideration and just slaps all lights into atlas calculations blindly inside the

Code (CSharp):

1.     for (int visibleLightIndex = 0; visibleLightIndex < visibleLights.Length; ++visibleLightIndex)

Loop around line 540 in AdditionalLightsShadowCasterPass.cs
I'll test fixing in by moving URP out of packages and editing that code manually to not bother certain types of lights.
I have re-written the code roughly to

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2.         bool IsValidShadowCastingLight(ref LightData lightData, int i)
3.         {
4.             if (i == lightData.mainLightIndex)
5.                 return false;
6.             else if(!lightData.supportsAdditionalLights)
7.                 return false;
8.  
9.             VisibleLight shadowLight = lightData.visibleLights[i];
10.            
11.             // Directional and light shadows are not supported in the shadow map atlas
12.             if (shadowLight.lightType == LightType.Directional)
13.                 return false;
14.  
15.             Light light = shadowLight.light;
16.            
17.             if(light.lightmapBakeType == LightmapBakeType.Baked)
18.                 return false;
19.  
20.             if(!light.enabled)
21.                 return false;
22.  
23.             return light != null && light.shadows != LightShadows.None && !Mathf.Approximately(light.shadowStrength, 0.0f);
24.         }

And it's no longer throwing errors for my case. Is that a valid change tho? No sure.

 

Bump. And I'll keep bumping this until Unity Staff wakes up.

I don't understand why this thread, despite a page of answers over a period of a year is getting zero attention from Unity Devs.

We're currently running a fully-baked environment with no realtime shadows, all Cameras' RenderShadows ticked off, ShadowDistance of 0 and URP asset setup like so:

And yet my in my profiler I can see triggers to various 'Additional Shadow' pass functions and get spam in Logs about reducting shadows resolutions.



What shadows?! What resolution?! There's nothing to render, there's nothing to reduce or calculate. Cull this out. What's the point of running this (& blocking the Main thread) code? seems like this is an If statement away from being fixed, but I can't do anything about it becuase it's package'd code.

@dnach - @ING you because you were the 1st one I've seen browsing sticky'd topics that was recently online, soz for spam

 

It's been another week with no replies from anyone, how hard can it be to read a forum post and at least acknowledge its existence unity team??

 

bumping this thread. have the same problem

 

You could ignore the problem by double clicking the error and commenting the debug.log() line that outputs the error, I don't know how to solve the problem tho

 

This doesn't solve the problem as URP Package re-import or upgrade tend to overwrite files, reversing that change.
We need a Unity-side fix.

Also, an official acknowledgement of a year-old issue with 2 page long thread would be appreciated. EA has better customer support than this.

 

Bump. Same problem here. About to push URP update soon to Phasmophobia, and our support team will have to manually go through and delete these logs.

 

Bump. Same problem here.... still no fix??

 

Just bumping because this is too annoying.

 

only one directional light in the scene with realtime soft shadows. Getting info about additional light shadows...what additional light shadows? All my additional lights in the scene have turned off shadows...still getting the msg

 

what is the current workaround to get rid of these messages?

 

I know this is necroing the thread, but the reason for this is that you are editing it in Library/PackageCache. If you wanna edit any package copy it from Library/PackageCache to Packages. I find it best to rename them not to have the version on the directory name, as that way any updates you do don't need fancy detect renames etc. in version control.

 

Not really necroing a thread if it's for an active issue that got no resolution or recognition still ;/

 

Going to throw one more stick on the pile hoping that at some point it gets some attention. I understand all the general concepts at play here but some of these limitations seem insane given modern rendering techniques. I have the following scenario:
1 Large low poly scene
1 Mixed Directional Light with no shadows
2 Low Poly Objects
4096 Max Shadow Map resolution

As soon as I add 1 non-directional light with shadows, even at 128 texture size, this error starts popping up. I either can decide to have shadows on a directional light that I don't want to have, or nothing unless I reduce my scene size. In 2023. Some people here might think this is OK, I personally strongly disagree and would really like to see Unity do something, or at least SAY something.

 

Totally helpfull for me! Great job thanks.

 

BUMP!
the same thing happens in version 2021.3.6f1, after switching to version 2021.3.19f1 the problem disappears, but you can't build because the textures and lighting don't work...

 

What a S***show unity is atm

 

is there a fix now ? This issue is bugging me

 

Ran into this with a totally baked scene and the latest 2021.3 doesn't make any sense at all!

 

Bump
getting this error in
Unity 2021.3.14f1

 

Here is how I fixed this error:

All you have to do is go inside your URP asset and check the "cast shadow" option, then change the shadow atlas resolution as your shadow resolution. Hope this helps.

 

Interesting. I still get the error with this fix, but only once instead of it spamming the console.

 

So I have been toying a bit with this issue and wanted to provide an answer that is neither "muh shadows" nor "yall insanse for wanting this much shadows".

First of all, there is no magic combination of settings for this. If you cranked up the Shadow Atlas Resolution to max and you still get this issue, you straight up have too many shadow casters. Period. The only thing you can do is reduce shadow resolutions to low or medium (trust me, it won't destroy your shadows, the worst it does is make them less pronounced/strong). If that does not help, your only solution is go trough every light one by one and decide which one you can get away with not casting shadows with. If you put in some effort you'd be surprised how few shadow casters you actually need to make your scenes look really good. Also keep ambient occlusion on. It helps you get away with a lot. It's essentially a game of whack-a-mole where you are trying to find the maximum number of shadow casters you can get away with.

There is a very good reason that out of all warnings Unity could spam endlessly, it's this one. It's a not so subtle hint that you should think twice about shadow casters. It's really annoying that it essentially offers no real solutions and it has seemingly no real consiquences (I mean the warning itself basically tells you that there is this issue that Unity already fixed?) but I assume it's a complex problem which has no simple answers unfortunately.

 

Not sure if this was mentioned but its pretty easy to set the Shadowmap resolution via reflection to get higher values. I'm using 16.384 even on a PS5 / PSVR 2 and it works fine (and actually has much better performance then constant downscaling calculations).