Mesh shadows with point light appear as ANTI-shadows!

Unity Engine
1

It’s the darndest thing. A picture can probably explain it better than words:

I have a single light in the scene, a point light with a range of 100. That’s a unit cube, which is casting a shadow just fine, and on top of it (with his foot slightly embedded in the cube) is my 2D character, a Skeleton Mesh with Mesh Renderer.

Using a directional light, this character casts shadows just fine. But with the point light, instead of casting shadows, he casts *anti-*shadows… that is, its only effect is to disrupt shadows cast by other objects. You can see this in the image above; the cube shadow has a foot-shaped hole in it, and the platform’s shadow has a cutout in the shape of the character as well.

So… WTF? And is there anything I can do about it? (A directional light just doesn’t work well for this scene.)

2

Nobody?

This is using the Spine shader, if that matters. Perhaps it’s something unique to that… I’ll go post on the Spine forum.

3

We are seeing the same issue. Occurs in 2017.4, but 2017.1 was fine with the same lights.

I started a new thread. I’ll post additional screenshots/videos there as we get them created:

4

If your comfortable using renderdoc you may want to take a snapshot and inspect the pass that creates the shadowmap. One thing to look out for is that the skinned mesh and the unity primitive should use the same depth comparison when rendering into the shadowmap. Unity introduced inverse-z rendering at some point (defined as UNITY_REVERSED_Z in the shader files), so maybe the object’s shadow pass doesn’t properly handle that.