My gosh I couldn’t believe that I didn’t notice this before buying unity, but:
“There’s no real-time shadow on the terrain!”
How could you guys live without that.
Right now all our characters just run around with no shadow. Has anyone came up with someway to work with this? Even a projected shadow is still better than none…
I’m pretty sure it’s being worked on for a near-future update. Just make your game without it in the meantime, and when the update comes, as long as cast shadows is checked the shadows should appear as if by magic! 
Umm… so the answer is to just wait for the company to stop being lazy and start working on this? :?
This is actually a crittical subject matter.
Even a very outdated game engine has this working.
You can’t expect to create a professional game with no real shadow working. :x
I’m pretty sure we’ll see this in a future update to Unity. In the mean time, if its a “must have” you can accomplish this by using a terrain mesh instead of the new terrain engine. Search the forums and wiki for info on how we used to accomplish terrains prior to Untiy 2.x.
You have to understand, Shadows and Terrain are both very new features to the engine, which is constantly changing and updating. Its been brought up multiple times, but UT aren’t superhumans.
Another option is for you to purchase the Unity Source Code license and fix it yourself. 
Actually, I don’t understand. This is suppost to be a working professional game engine.
You can’t just say:
“Sorry dude, this feature is very important in all game engine but sadly it isn’t finished in our product. If you want to do it yourself, pay us another ten thousand dollars and we’ll send you source code so you can finish it for us. Otherwise, just suck it up and deal with it. Your game will have no shadow.”
Can we at least get to hear someone from Unity on this matter? At least our company need to know if this is going to be done or not and if so when will it be?
Dude, nobody’s saying that (at least nobody here on the forum).
What I was trying to explain in my post was that you can accomplish what you want to do with Unity 2.x, you just can’t use the latest terrain tools to do it. As nice as the new terrain tools are, as you’ve noted, they aren’t 100% complete, so we’re not using them in our projects yet and are accomplishing multi-textured, bumped terrains, etc by using scripts that were originally developed for Unity 1.6x. The new real time shadows work fine with this.
Look for some of the older threads by Eric, Boxy and others on terrains, shadows, etc. You’ll find all the tools you need to do what you want, right now.
Semi-random thoughts: You can do a search of the forums on this subject to see official word from UT on the matter. Basically, they said they’re working on it. They don’t give out specific dates for when features will be done. I haven’t seen any terrain engine like Unity’s in other engines, so it’s not accurate to say “even outdated engines do this”, because they don’t. There are shadow workarounds; do a search in the forum for Off-Road Velociraptor Safari to see one. If it’s that critical to have shadows “just work” on terrains right away, then don’t use the terrain engine for now, and use a standard mesh instead. There have been a number of professional games done with Unity. The terrain engine isn’t appropriate to use in every single game, or even the majority of them, even if it was completely finished. It’s pretty much impossible to find any complex software, anywhere, that is 100% finished and has no limitations with any of its features. Also, the UT folks are probably the very opposite of “lazy”.
–Eric
You could create a projector and position it at the center of the terrain and have it face downwards. Set orthographic to true. Size the projector to where it is as big as the terrain. Then have the projector’s texture be the terrain’s lightmap.
Here’s an example of what I mean:
Dear Daniel, your example does the opposite of what I want; it cast terrain’s shadowmap onto the objects. What I want is to cast main object’s shadow onto the terrain.
I know this is probably not what you want to hear, but current Terrain Engine isn’t working up to the professional standard at all. Instead of you people defending Unity (which is nice as a community) I prefer to hear that you guys demand that Unity fix this very very soon.
There’s tons of other engine that has this working (this is actually the first engine I know of that doesn’t have real time shadow cast onto terrain.) but let’s not argue over trivia points. I’m just here trying to get our game done on time with quality and I expect that Unity Engine delivers what it should deliver.
Can we at least get to hear some words from people who is working on this?
I really at least need to know some specific date so we can decide what to do. :x
Just having a look…
Pretty cool script!
Thanks for sharing
G>
I think Aras (from Unity) said that they are going to include projector shadows on terrains in next update (2.0.3).
Come on, you make it sound like we’re refusing comment, while this thread only started today … a Sunday 
As as we continually prove, we work extremely hard trying to fix all the bugs and shortcomings of our software. And in this specific case, we’ve commented in other threads that this shortcoming is one we are working on solving.
d.
Dear David,
Glad I can get you on this matter. I don’t expect this to be done instantly. I understand that you guys are working hard on this and it takes time. But I still need an estimated date on this though. Can you provide us some clue on when this feature will be available? :?
I’m pretty sure that this script works on the terrain:
http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=Shadow_Volumes_in_Alpha
Look at this example:
And if you want the characters to not cast shadows while they are already in shadow (Daniel’s example has this problem) You can solve that too through a variety of methods, the simplest being checking the color of the lightmap pixel the character is on and turning the shadow on or off depending on that. You could also do something like render the negative of the terrain lightmap on the character as additive. If you want soft shadows, add the blur effect to the shadow camera.
Basically, this method could be expanded quite a lot and it should definitely hold you over until real time shadows are on the terrain.
Dang does it works? I’m at my home right now. So I can’t see if this really works or not. From my glance at the script it seems extruding faces to cast shadow might not be the best method though. I’ll let you know tomorrow. Thanks for the help anyway, at least those advertisement about awesome community is correct.
Sorry I was kinda rude the first few posts. I was really mad since I felt this is such an important issue and it was never raised up anywhere about the engine. You must understand, having two seperated samples (one for shadow and one for terrain) tends to make people believe that they can have both at the same time. Finding out later that it isn’t so after you have paid your money wasn’t a pleasant feeling. :?
yes it works, even for Unity Indie.