I’d like to use the LOD system to suppress certain small objects from casting / receiving shadows beyond a certain distance (which should greatly speed up the frame rate), but there doesn’t seem to be any setting for this on an object-by-object basis (only globally). Of course, I could still use the LOD system to do this by having an entire additional set of GOs for each LOD level and then disable shadows on that additional group, but in this case it’s a bit of a waste because most of the objects still have the same mesh, material etc, and therefore there wouldn’t be any other need to set up an additional GO for each one. The only other option I can find is to set the global shadow distance in Quality settings, but that means suppressing shadows from large objects, which I probably don’t want to do. I suppose I could write custom shaders which suppress the shadowcasting pass at a certain distance, but that might be a lot of work to redo all the materials I already have.
Does anyone know of another option?
Oddly, my experiments have found that shadowcasters do not seem to slow it down much, if at all: doubling the number of shadowcasters doesn’t effect the framerate, or at most it only drops 1 or 2 fps. I confirmed from the stats window that the number of shadowcasters was in fact doubling, so I wasn’t screwing up the experiment, Anyone know what the typical case is?
Shouldn’t the number of shadowcasters have a large effect on performance?