Forum Thread

Inspired by many AAA titles, this screenspace technique is used for generating very efficient low frequency shadows and ambient occlusion, which are usually missing in places with no direct lighting and shadowing. This greatly helps making characters feel more grounded and allows them to have area light shadows and most importantly it's seamless to implement with the existing light probes system, as the shadows direction is sampled per character from the light probes.

• Uses a single compute shader for everything, no material shaders are needed.
• Characters can be dynamically instantiated/destroyed.
• There's no limit on the number of characters, and the screenspace implementation makes it way more performant than classic shadow mapping.
• Renders a mask for character meshes so that they don't have self occlusion artifacts.
• Extremely easy setup with 1 component to be added on the camera and 1 on each character (or arbitrary group of capsules), and their included custom inspectors.
• Samples the dominant light direction from the interpolated light probe the character is at, and each character works independantly.
• Uses an axis aligned bounding box based screen space culling per character to optimize an already very performant shader.
• Allows for rendering ambient shadows only in already shadowed areas using a luminance blend parameter.

Comes with 3 Implementations:

• Built in render pipeline
• Post processing stack V2 custom effect
• HDRP Custom pass