Realtime shadows don't always render

Question

As you can see on the screenshot below, some of my walls are rendering realtime shadows, others are not. I know it's better to use lightmapping for static objects and I do intend to bake it later, but I was wondering why that happened. It also happened with a couple of other objects in my scene.

They are all using a Diffuse shader, have a BoxCollider (they actually have mesh colliders, but I already tried replacing them for boxcolliders, not$$anonymous$$ng different happened), have both Cast and Receive shadows marked on the renderer component, and I already tried switc$$anonymous$$ng from 'static' to 'not static'. Unity Pro.

There's only one directional light in my scene and I'm using forward rendering.

Why is it happening?

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Answer 1

Answer by Kryptos · Jul 19, 2012 at 06:14 PM

There might be somet$$anonymous$$ng wrong with the normals on your wall mesh. The shadows from the trees should be stopped by the walls.

What happens when you rotate the walls that are not casting shadow by 180 degrees around the y-axis?

edit: obviously, normals are not the issue here. I keep t$$anonymous$$s answer because of the comments above.

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pedronaroga · Jul 19, 2012 at 06:20 PM 0

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Nothing happens when I rotate my walls...

Since the normals are generated from importing the model (and I can change its configurations on the FBXImporter), it shouldn't work on a different scene if that was the case, should it? If I add the exact same model on another scene, it works :(

pedronaroga · Jul 19, 2012 at 06:26 PM 0

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Also, changing from the Normals from "Import" to "Calculate" on the FBXImporter doesn't fix the problem. Changing from "Import" to "None" makes everything dark (duh!). Is there anywhere else I can experiment with normals without editing the model inside 3DS MAX?

Alayna · Jul 19, 2012 at 06:30 PM 0

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I did a small test with point lights casting shadows on either side of a plane with only normals on one side. Both lights cast shadows, so I don't think that normals are the problem in this case.

pedronaroga · Jul 19, 2012 at 06:35 PM 0

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Point lights shouldn't cast shadows in forward rendering, should they? I have a lot of point lights in my scene (I just hid the gizmos on the screenshots above - sorry I forgot to mention that)... should it interfere with the shadows?

Alayna · Jul 19, 2012 at 06:43 PM 0

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Ah, no point lights dont cast shadows in forward rendering, but I checked it again with a directional light and the normal had no effect on casting shadows in that case either. I had my scene in Deffered Rendering before so I didnt notice it at first sorry.

Edit: Speaking of which, if you change it to Deffered for a moment, are the shadows the same?

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Realtime shadows don't always render

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