URP Point Light Shadows

I wonder if adding those shadows is such a hard matter that takes years, how is the whole programmable pipeline concept was supposed to work in the first place ?

Seems like doing anything in pipelines is like doing alien technology at this point, so the pipelines concept seem really strange idea.

 

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2020/08/13/the-road-to-2021/ Based on the recent road map, and the comments I guess unity will get only hate and less good feedback from the users. Looks like we wont get much other then poor fixes =)) .The shadows on urp for transparent material objects are still off in the code and you need to manual turn it on if you know where to look. This is what hapends when they do test it well.

 

This is so sad.. URP really needs realtime shadows for pointlights.

 

Even though URP led to a lot of pain and butt hurt for me and my team, I do see a very nice visual & performance improvements in our project, but it doesn't worth it without basic stuff like point light shadows and AO.
Honestly, I couldn't even imagine this is possible, so I simply didn't know these features are missing when we switched...
Would be nice to at least have a Unity representative in this thread.

 

I will say you can buy a solid AO asset HBAO. Thats what I did, i find it much nicer than PPSv2's AO anyway, cause it also includes color bleed and filtering by lighting aswell.

Also turns out you can download a TAA by unity from github, which was my second main hiccup.

 

Seems like the pull request for point light shadows has been opened today:
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/1616

It doesn't have any "needs backport" labels, so I'm afraid it will land in 2020.2+, which is really disappointing - another couple of months without a basic feature.

 

I don't see any reason it can't be back ported, isn't that the point of package manager in the first place?

Cause if they want to sell people on URP but a dev is going to whan
to use the latest LTS for the next couple years, not back porting at least to the latest LTS doesn't make sense.

Like they should at least assume the things asked for the most, considered critical, would benefit someone's current project hence the awareness of how critical it is. And most of those people are likely using LTS versions.

And while Unity may be on verison lock, specific single assets may not be if they can benefit the project.

 

Well, yeah, the point of packages should be independence of Unity version to an extent. But as stated in this post: https://forum.unity.com/threads/wha...nity-with-scriptable-render-pipelines.924218/, point light shadows are mentioned in the section "planned for 2021.1". But the PR I posted above is to be merged with current master, which should be URP 10.x.x for Unity 2020.2, so they probably moved that up the priorities list. But backporting this to LTS or at least Unity 2020.1 (because I want to use the new UI Toolkit Runtime UI) would be great. This is just a must have basic engine feature and I consider its absence a bug.

 

Can you please share a link to AO for PPSv2 and TAA?

 

https://assetstore.unity.com/packag...effects/horizon-based-ambient-occlusion-54780

https://github.com/sienaiwun/TAA_Unity_URP

 

I just posted on the other thread for this. September now (almost October, really) and still nothing. In the other thread they said by "early 2019."

This is as bad as the removal of the built-in asset store window, which was replaced with a "Guess which version you're using" Package Manager instead.

 

Hey there I've posted this elsewhere but want to echo it here.

I just wanted to give you a heads up that I've poked the team and they'll be looking to update the Point Light Shadow Card for it located at https://portal.productboard.com/unity/1-unity-graphics with a bit more information that'll hopefully provide a little more transparency on this.

I hope this helps!

 

Hey Shaunyowns, thanks for the info!
It seems like the pull request to add Point Light Shadows is mostly ready but is still pending some reviews from various teams and is already open for more then a month. Can we expect this feature for 2020.2 (or 2020.3 LTS)? It's after all the most requested feature and further delaying this would be really painful for a lot of people.

 

URP Point Light Shadows support in 2020.3 LTS along with Ambient Oclussion would be the best move.

 

@Shaunyowns Glad to see you here, I still keep expecting you to pop up in RS streams

Thanks for the info, it is helpful! I wish it hadn't taken 2 years to get this close to a fix, but at this point (see what I did?) the sooner the better.

I'm really just exhausted from the shiny, new, expansive featuresets getting announced while things like this lurk around for those of us that use them.

 

Is it even worth it to start a project in URP right now? I'm ready to begin importing assets into Unity and begin coding for my new project and want to use URP mainly for shader graph and the performance benefits. But I really need point light shadows and it looks like they may still be a couple months away.

 

That's really up to you. I'm enjoying URP, I find it better overall. Of course there's some learning curve just like anytime you switch to something new. It's just very frustrating when you keep finding things that were working in the "old" pipeline, and you're expected to be using either HDRP or URP, but the features haven't been finished or are reduced. Something like shadows is a great example.

Want another pain point? Try using terrains with grass in HDRP. I gave up and switched to URP!

 

Looks like the team are finalising the "What's new in URP 10.0.0" page for the docs and... no Point Light Shadows.

I suppose this means they won't be supported in 2020.2, and we'll have to wait for 2021.1

 

Yeah, why rush... It's just a most requested feature... for the engine to support... shadows? I just can't wrap my head around this. The pull request is sitting there for 2 months, just waiting for the reviews to finish. 2020.2 is still in beta, just put the feature there so we can all test it and give feedback. Unity will have enough time to flesh it out by the 2020.3 LTS. The "speed" of Unity doing something (this important) is beyond me. If I have to wait for another TECH release to have proper shadows in my game, I'm gonna loose it.

 

Yeah, w8 for 2021.1 to be able to have point light shadows and AO but nothing else.

 

Epic is offering Epic MegaGrands becuase they are milking Fortnite. If you were forced to pay 30% of royalties to Unity, Unity would also offer "free stuff". Free isn't free in this word, there is always somebody putting the money.

This image of Epic being generous needs to end.

 

Wow, I'm shocked at discovering this. I was working on improving mobile performance, had finally gotten everything working well, and now discover that URP is incapable of doing any sort of dynamic shadows on baked surfaces.

Want to fake it with blob shadows? Too bad, projectors don't work.

How about Shadow Masks? Nope, "In research" and your 2019 LTS version is never gonna see it.

Going back to SRP until they figure this out, I just feel so gaslit being told URP was production-ready, and it doesn't even support some of the most basic of lighting features for performant projects.

 

Any news on the development of this feature ?

It seems like it started development a lifetime ago now, and i have some doubts is ever coming as it seems impossible to implement at this point.

So i suppose using the URP is out of the question, hopefully Unity will never deprecate standard pipeline, the only thing that works 100% and is also a million times faster than HDRP and can do same or better graphics and can go down as needed for more lightweight graphics, plus is exponentially more user friendly.

I still cant grasp why change something so perfect as the standard pipeline with the new useless SRPs and in the process completely fragment the previously unified development between desktop and mobile.

 

I don't want to sound like i'm defending UT here but they've made good progress you can check on the repository if you want to play with it a little bit
But according to the conversation on github from a week ago it's seems like they are experiencing a crash on one android device they are testing on
But overall it's works

 

The main issue is that a thing like that takes everything back a very long time now, plus seem to be only for newer versions, which is a very big problem. Is there any chance we get this fix in Unity 2019.4 LTS ?

 

None of the new "features" (I don't consider shadows a feature but core functionality...) will be backported. Most of the new stuff will land in 2020.2 but so far it seems like point light shadows aim for 2021.1, which would be infuriating.

 

2020.2 I hope

 

This is so terrible if true, all previous Unity versions are useless, seems crazy to even think about it.

 

The Point Light Shadows Pull Request was finally merged yesterday.

 

oh great, thanks for the heads up.

I just solved an issue with my new volumetric URP lighting system in URP 10 and am exited to soon implement point lights into that system as well

BTW, which URP version is this supposed to be officially released in ?

 

I always have a hard time finding pages like that in github...
There is some great info on that page:

Looks like the URP point light shadows were tested with the URP Deferred Renderer

and

"Overall, the cost of adding Universal RP Point Light Shadows to the scene, is less than the cost of adding Built-In RP Point Light Shadows to the same scene"

This is great!

 

Point light shadows were added to the changelog for 11.0. My understanding is that URP 11.0 is for 2021.1 and will not be available in 2020.2 or 2020.3 LTS. So if we want URP with point light shadows, we can wait 6-8 months for a TECH release, or more than a year for a LTS release...

Remember in 2018 when this feature was "coming soon"?

I mean I'm glad they're finally adding it but jesus. Every day the grass looks greener over at other engines.

 

I wonder why that changelog has not been added here Other changelog

 

Why tho... 2020.2 is still in beta. Just add this ABSOLUTELY BASIC feature already and not let us wait another year or jump to alphas for crying out loud.

 

preach it sister

 

Just wanted to point out in the original post here

The below text outlined some release times for specific features in the above post. Looks like everything is on track so far.

Here are some of the features we are shipping for URP in 2020.2:

• SSAO support
• Mixed lighting modes including shadow mask, distance shadow mask and more
• Deferred renderer support
• Improved material inputs (detail normal maps, height maps, parallax mapping, other)
• VR-specific post processing functionality for Hololens, Magic Leap, Windows MR (stability, quality, optimizations)
• Across the board major swaths of bug fixes for stability, quality and performance, addressing key areas for URP

Additionally, here are some of the features that we are currently working on for URP in 2021.1:

• Light cookies support
• Deferred renderer optimization for mobile platforms
• Point light shadows and other shadow improvements for URP, such as shadow distance fade, shadow cascade blending, and more
• Shader tier system for URP platform and tier scalability configurability
• Additional post processing, including per-object motion blur, auto-exposure, and motion vector support
• Virtual texturing URP support

 

Light proxy volumes ...?

 

@Bosozuki Thanks for digging that up. I also found this post:

> > I'd like to know if there's any chance that URP point light shadows could be backported to at least Unity 2020.1. It's such a basic feature (and most requested) that I would consider it a bug that shadows don't work on realtime point lights.

> Thank you for your question. Point light shadows is a new feature for URP. Unfortunately we won't be back-porting point light shadows. This is to make sure we do not affect the stability of the older versions of Unity.

I'm still disappointed that the feature is so delayed, but they were upfront about it.

 

Like everyone else I would like the new features faster but I will take stability first

And this year 2020 has been a little trying for most so productivity has slowed down with new working conditions. We may be working from home but quite a few people all of a sudden have very young kids to take care of at home and for people who are single has its own set of challenges i.e if you are not use to working alone and can be difficult.

I am actually quite impressed with everything Unity has accomplished this year. The Unite now shader graph video gave a good insight how the SRPs are being brought back into core Unity and how you may be able to switch between pipelines in a single project and how that affects shader development.

 

I like your kind and understanding attitude. I shall strive to emulate it.

Do you have a link to the Unite Now video you're talking about? I searched the recent videos on Unity's youtube channel but couldn't find it.

 

For some reason the Unite now videos show up on as unlisted on youtube but here is a direct link Unite Now Shader graph

Around 13 min mark in the video is where Alex Lindman shows the potential srp switching.

This the direct link to the Unite now page for the video

 

Realtime point light shadow work just fine even in 2020.2 beta (Beta 8 last time I checked)
Just clone the graphics repository

 

How do we access the latest URP version? 11.0.0 is not appearing on either 2021 alpha nor 2020 beta to me

 

2021.1 beta was released, point light shadows are up and running with URP 11.0 in the package manager.

 

oh this is amazing news, thanks for the heads up, cant wait to try it out with my URP volumetric lighting system in Sky Master ULTIMATE system (videos above). So far was limited to only spot and directional volume shadows.

Is there any chance to get those in previous URP versions like 7.4.3 or 10.2 ?

 

From what Unity has said in the past LTS releases are not suppose to receive new features only bug fixes.

Since URP 7.x.x is 2019 LTS and URP 11.x.x is 2021 I doubt Unity will back port. I read through the git hub comments and URP 11 seems to have quite a few changes under the hood especially since it also contains and inactive deferred renderer for URP so that could potentially add issues to urp 7.x.x which would break the stability of the LTS release

 

2020.2 is still a TECH release (and has only had 2 releases yet), which means new features, Why can't I have URP 11 there? Or have point light shadows backported to URP 10.x? They should still have enough time to stabilize it until 2020.3 LTS. This just means waiting another couple of months for another half broken TECH release (2021.1).

 

The issue with all this is that now anything below URP11 is totally meaningless to use, as is missing critical features

 

Switched my project from 2019 to 2021 almost seamlessly. Minor shaders and post effects issues. Editor crashes sometimes, though feels like opens faster, but at least most features are there. Just need to get Deferred Rendering, since only 8 lights per object allowed with Forward, and will be fully operational Game Engine with basic functions again...

 

I'm glad to see this got sorted. We actually moved over to Unreal because of this issue, but its nice to know we now have the option to come back to Unity if we are looking for something a little less UE. Unity is still my choice for making stuff on phones, but it's got really convoluted at this point and I'm finding UE4 kinda refreshing because eveything just works out of the box. I was speaking to the lads on my team about it, and I think a lot of this stems from Unity not actually making games. With Epic, because they primarily make stuff with their engine, they develop the tools and functionality to make game dev easier based on their use cases, which is why the evolution of their engine is so completely different.