Hard shadows glitching geometry in Android

Questions & Answers
1

I’ve noticed in my recent builds that when I enable hard shadows on a point light, all of the geometry in the scene goes a bit crazy. However, this only happens in Android.

Here’s a screenshot of the game running on Android with real time shadows disabled:

82019-noshadows.jpg
82019-noshadows.jpg1280×720 196 KB

And here’s a screenshot of the game running on Android with real time shadows enabled:

82020-shadowsbroken.jpg
82020-shadowsbroken.jpg1280×720 153 KB

As you can see, all of the geometry is completely messed up when hard shadows are enabled.

Things to note:

  • In the Unity editor (and on iOS), the real time shadows work completely fine.

  • I’ve been building this game for a while. In the past, the real-time shadows worked on Android completely fine. I’ve only noticed recently that they cause this glitch, as I haven’t turned the shadows on in a long time. So I’m unsure when this glitch started happening, but I can confirm that it did used to work OK at some point in the past.

  • This is on Unity 5.5b11, but I’ve also tried building in 5.3 and 5.4, and it has the same issue.

  • EDIT: After doing some more testing, I can confirm this problem doesn’t affect directional lights. A directional light in this scene with shadows set to “Hard” casts shadows properly, and it works OK. As soon as I switch it to a point light, it starts showing the same messed up geometry as in the picture.

Any ideas what’s wrong? Any suggestions on how I might fix this?

Thanks in advance.

2

couple of guesses:

  1. check the distance of light, it might get glitchy shadows if it’s very big (above 500)

  2. see if enabling cascades helps in Project->quality settings of the game

  3. play with “Bias”, “Normal Bias” and “Shadow Near Plane” settings of the light

3.5) shadow distance in Project->quality settings shouldn’t be above 1000

  1. perhaps the material’s shader is broken after the update

  2. check camera’s near and far clipping planes, they shouldn’t have a difference larger than 500 ish