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.
(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.