Sharp Shadows Toolkit

The Sharp Shadows Toolkit is a code package that brings sharp, pixel-perfect shadows to your Universal Render Pipeline (URP) project. Many games and experiences target a non-photo-realistic art style for which sharp shadows are better suited than the built-in shadows that tend to be either too soft or too jagged, especially on low quality settings.

The toolkit can be useful in a wide variety of scenarios, from old-school drop shadows for characters in a mobile game to ubiquitous high quality shadows for an architecture visualization project.

Features

• Dynamic pixel-perfect shadows for the Lightweight/Universal Render Pipeline
• No jagged shadow edges or visible pixels
• Seamless editor integration using automatic asset post processing
• Custom shadow direction for e.g. drop shadows
• Two rendering modes
  • Inject Into Screen Space Shadow Resolve Texture: Inject into screen space shadow texture for optimal image quality
  • Multiply Scene After Opaque: Draw after opaque geometry for optimal performance
• Handles both skinned and non-skinned meshes
• No restriction on the mesh geometry of the shadow caster
• Multi-object editing
• Fog support

Current Limitations

• For the Lightweight/Universal Render Pipeline only
• Only supports the main directional light of the scene
• No support for custom vertex displacement
• Alpha blended or clipped geometry will produce solid shadows (the shape of the triangles)
• Skinned mesh shadows may appear cracked if they are subject to large deformations
• Shadows are not anti-aliased when injected into screen space shadow texture

Supported Unity builds

Note Due to the large number of possible Unity/URP version combinations, only the above combinations are officially supported.