How to change shadow behavior (using Polyspatial Lighting and Environment Radiance Nodes?)

Unity Engine
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Hello,

New to shadergraph and trying to figure some things out.

Specifically want to be able to change the behavior of how shadows are cast by objects in a Fully Immersive MR environment with Polyspatial.

I have read the documentation on the Polyspatial Lighting and Environment Radiance nodes, but I’m still a bit lost on how to get control over shadows with these shaders. I need a way to change shadow colors, as well as how dark they are and I need to be able to dictate the angle at which the shadows are cast.

I don’t see any way to do this currently as Polyspatial seems to ignore my lighting setup at runtime as well as my Shadow settings.

Can someone provide some assistance to help me understand how to set things up so that I can control how shadows are cast by my objects, similar to how I would in a normal unity project?

The grounding shadow script provided by the SDK works as expected, but I see no way to adjust its behavior in anyway, whether that’s changing the shadow color, intensity or angle.

I need to be able to control shadows for a project I am working on. Please let me know what additional information I can provide or how I might be able to get the functionality I’m looking for.

Thank you!

2

From the tag on this post, it looks like you’re using Unity 2022.3/PolySpatial 1.X. In visionOS 2, Apple added their own support for dynamic lights with shadows, and we support that in Unity 6000/PolySpatial 2.X. There’s a section in the documentation that covers how to enable those lights (and shadows).

The Dynamic Lights option in the PolySpatial Lighting node doesn’t support shadows.

1 Like
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Ah… ok.

So we’re going to need to move Unity Versions then?

Thanks for the info kapolka.

Is it safe to assume that no further updates are going to be made for Unity 2022 LTS and polyspatial then?

4

I wouldn’t expect any new features, at any rate. We’ll continue to support PolySpatial 1.X in maintenance mode, but most of our efforts are now on PolySpatial 2.X.

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5

Ok. Thanks for the help as always. Time to go sell a unity version change to my higher ups.

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Hello, sir. I also encountered issues with shadow settings during the development process. After seeing this reply, I would like to ask for clarification: currently, there is no way to control the intensity and color of the shadows, is that correct?

7

That’s correct, and it applies both to the Grounding Shadows and the spot/directional shadows. In both cases, it’s because Apple’s RealityKit API doesn’t provide a way to control shadow color or intensity.

However, I should point out that “real” shadows (that is, the kind that RealityKit supports for spot/directional lights) are subtractive, which means that controlling their color/intensity doesn’t make much sense: instead, you control the color and intensity of the light, which then affects everything that isn’t in shadow.