just a 2d shadow

Unity's Shadow Caster 2D needs a Light 2D and a polygon you draw by hand — a polygon that doesn't change when your sprite animates.

just a 2d shadow skips all of it. Add one component to any Sprite Renderer and it re-reads your sprite every frame, drawing it sheared and squashed in the vertex shader. The

silhouette is always the current animation frame, through walk cycles, sprite swaps and

flipping. Nothing to author, and nothing to redo when the animation changes.

No Light 2D, no Shadow Caster 2D, no renderer feature, no changes to your renderer asset.

THREE MODES

Projected — a sheared, squashed copy of the sprite.

Blob — a procedural ellipse, no texture read.

Soft Drop — projected plus a blur, entirely in the fragment shader.

CROSSING SHADOWS DON'T DOUBLE-DARKEN

No dark patch where two shadows overlap. Three ways to handle it are built in, including

an exact stencil method.

FOR REAL SCENES

Shadows stay on the ground when characters jump, shrinking and fading along curves you

control. Pixel art gets world-space snapping that survives a Pixel Perfect Camera and

whole-pixel shear. One optional Director sweeps the sun across every shadow at once.

REQUIRES

Universal Render Pipeline, Unity 6000.0 LTS or newer. Works on both the URP 2D Renderer

and URP Forward. Not compatible with Built-in RP or HDRP.