So, if you have functioning retinas, you may have noticed that Unity's shadows can be a bit lackluster at the best of times. Don't get me wrong, I love Unity, both as an engine and a company, but I've long dreamed of soft, realistic shadows. Well, I may not have exactly achieved my dreams, but I think I'm in the realm of daydreams. Recently, I've taken the scraps of code in Nvidia's white papers, slotted them into a copy of Unity's built in shader, and spent a few long nights filling in the maddeningly missing pieces. The result is some (in my opinion) fairly nice shadows:

I love how they fade out and blur as they get further away, it just adds so much over the usual "soft shadows", that are just hard shadows with a bit of fuzz around the edges. I wrote it on my own time, but I'm showing pictures of them in The Universim because I got bored of my ugly test scene, and wanted to see how they'd fare in a real environment. What better than the one I've been working on over these last two years, and have tried everything I could think of (in other words, not much) to squeeze a bit more beauty out of?





Also, if I keep posting pictures of it all gussied up like this, maybe I'll be able to use "public demand" as a bargaining chip to make sure Alex lets me add them (not that he doesn't want them, he's just worried about performance, but this would obviously be for those with perf to spare).

But enough blabber mouthing. If anyone is interested in these shadows, I'll be cleaning up the code and am considering somehow distributing it, whether that be through the Asset Store or GitHub, if people are interested. Also, if you were looking for more of a tutorial, I'd be willing to do that as well.



