Low shadow quality from distance light

Here I go asking something for the third time (this and this) hoping this time somebody answer me. I’m creating a race game. It has a track set in a dark place, so I design some stadium lights to illuminate. Knowing light is a expensive resource, I made those lights supports tall and distant enough to use only 4.

I terms of lighting, it works very fine, but the car’s shadows were too ugly. It isn’t even like a shadow. So I’ve created a separated project and tested many different lighting and quality settings. The only variable that made difference is the distance of the light to the objects.

Does any one knows how I can reach shadows with quality from a distance light (spot or point light)?

ps: I know how to use bake light. It is for the cars that are always moving.

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[73006-lights.zip|73006]

Edit:

I created a video to show it better : YouTube

(We can’t see what quality settings you’re using, but I’ll assume that you’ve already set this to highest quality for your shadows.)

450 units is a huge range for a point light, so inevitably the resolution of the shadows it casts will be reduced. See here for an explanation: Unity - Manual: Shadow Size Computation. You’re also possibly running out of video memory so Unity is not using the highest resolution map created - point lights create shadow cubemaps - can you use directional lights instead?

So of course you know shadows can be render heavy, and making them dynamic even more so. You could use a little “cheat” or “fake” the shadows if you will…paint a “shadow” texture with Alpha in Photoshop, slap that on a plane in Unity, attach the plane under your car - bam - easy dynamic shadow. It will look believable in-game…obviously the static shadows might get a closer look so it is a good idea to bake those, but for moving shadows this is cheaper and easier.