Smart Shadows

Tested on Unity from 5.0 to 2022.2

Smart Shadows is a unique tool that helps you dramatically improve your game performance when using real time shadows. Contrary to the default Unity behavior that renders each shadow map, even for far and not visible lights, Smart Shadows automatically and smoothly enable pertinent shadows and disable others, improving a lot your game rendering performance.

With this tool, you will get the best of dynamic shadows, without the performance issues.

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Smart Dynamic Shadow Manager

Smart Shadows is a dynamic shadow manager that automatically and smoothly enables and disables dynamic shadows when you move on the scene. The algorithm chooses which shadows to enable based on a light priority algorithm, which offers a lot of customization to match your needs. This allows to have a lot of dynamic shadows in the scene by automatically enabling only pertinent shadows and disabling others.

For Complex or Simple Lighting

Whether for use in complex lighting with lots of shadows, or simpler lighting with very little active shadows, Smart Shadows will help you manage active shadows to render only pertinent ones.

Highly customizable to your needs

Smart Shadows is flexible and comes with several settings to adapt its behavior to your scene constraints.

• With the Maximum Simultaneous Shadows, lights are sorted by pertinence depending on the player position and the custom light settings, and only the highest priority shadows are activated.

• Set the Maximum Light Influence Distance to activate only the shadows within a given range.

• Set the Light Shadow Importance, and custom Settings, to better control which lights are activated and what happens when their shadow is disabled.

Smooth Fade In and Out

When enabled or disabled the shadows smoothly fade in or out, making the change hardly noticeable by the player, even more when focused on playing.

Reduce Inconsistent Lighting

When enabling and disabling shadows, some changes in the local illumination may become too obvious. Smart Shadows comes with tools to help you reduce those behaviors.

• Use the Range and Intensity Reduction to reduce the light illumination when its shadow is disabled, to reduce inconsistent scene lighting.

Automatic Quality Settings

Use the Quality Level Settings to adapt the shadow constraints to the device performance.

Automatically Adapt Shadow Resolutions

Enable the Shadow Resolution Reduction to reduce automatically the resolution of the lowest priority shadows, to improve the computational time.

Extra Animation Scripts

The asset comes with light animation scripts for fire, flickering and periodic lights.

(NEW) FPS graph

A FPS graph tool is included to better benchmark your game performance.

URP, HDRP Compatibility

Compatible with Standard Rendering Pipeline, URP and HDRP.

Professional Quality

• Clean source code included.

• Detailed documentation.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have a feature request, or any question, issue or suggestion: [email protected].