[Released] Ambient Character Shadows - A Capsule soft shadow implementation

[cgDoofus]

@blueivy

I’m actually fine with having soft direct shadows, just wanted to see if I would need to make any changes to she shader which you answered! Thanks!

You’ll find what you need to change in Character Shadow script, you can modify the light direction vector that gets passed in a struct to the shader

[blueivy]

@cgDoofus

You’ll find what you need to change in Character Shadow script, you can modify the light direction vector that gets passed as a struct to the shader

Thanks for the information, asset bought! Excited for everything on your roadmap. Specifically the spheres and box support.

[atomicjoe]

Hi @cgDoofus ! I love your ambient shadows!
Will you be implementing box shadows along with capsule shadows? I would really need them for doors.

[pojpitak]

Hello,

It’s exactly what I need for my game!

However, I’m facing issues where shadows only appear on box and planes.

I’m having issues where the shadows won’t appear on light-baked meshes?

Also, I can’t seem to change the direction of the shadow, even while moving the directional light into another direction.

Any help would really be appreciated!

Thanks!

[cgDoofus]

@atomicjoe

Hi @cgDoofus ! I love your ambient shadows!
Will you be implementing box shadows along with capsule shadows? I would really need them for doors.

Hello! This doesn’t work too well when shadows overlap, so if a character’s capsule shadows are over a door’s box shadow it will have some artifacts, also the door’s shadow probably wouldn’t blend too well with the rest of the environment.
I’ll try to figure out a good way to support arbitrary shape shadows with the current capsule groups (characters) system though

@pojpitak

Hello,

It’s exactly what I need for my game!

However, I’m facing issues where shadows only appear on box and planes.

I’m having issues where the shadows won’t appear on light-baked meshes?

Also, I can’t seem to change the direction of the shadow, even while moving the directional light into another direction.

Any help would really be appreciated!

Thanks!

That’s odd, it’s a screenspace effect therefore it should show up on all sorts of materials, even unlit ones, maybe it has to do with Luminance Blend factor? also which version are you using?
The shadow direction isn’t controlled by directional lights, it approximates the dominant light direction from light probes. However it’s easy to change this behaviour and pass in your own shadow direction vector, there’s a method in CharacterShadow script named lightDirection, you can replace its logic by whatever you want.

[pojpitak]

@cgDoofus

Hello! This doesn’t work too well when shadows overlap, so if a character’s capsule shadows are over a door’s box shadow it will have some artifacts, also the door’s shadow probably wouldn’t blend too well with the rest of the environment.
I’ll try to figure out a good way to support arbitrary shape shadows with the current capsule groups (characters) system though

That’s odd, it’s a screenspace effect therefore it should show up on all sorts of materials, even unlit ones, maybe it has to do with Luminance Blend factor? also which version are you using?
The shadow direction isn’t controlled by directional lights, it approximates the dominant light direction from light probes. However it’s easy to change this behaviour and pass in your own shadow direction vector, there’s a method in CharacterShadow script named lightDirection, you can replace its logic by whatever you want.

Yeah, I’m having issues with it. While the demo scenes work. The other scenes doesn’t sometimes, would you be able to help trouble shoot or understand it better by any chance.

[cgDoofus]

@pojpitak

Yeah, I’m having issues with it. While the demo scenes work. The other scenes doesn’t sometimes, would you be able to help trouble shoot or understand it better by any chance.

Sure, send me a PM.

[Onat-H]

Hi, the asset doesn’t seem to work on metal (macOs). the capsule shadows compute shader throws an error in line 157 (cannot implicitly convert from uint2 to uint3 at kernel DeferredPath)

[cgDoofus]

@Onat-H

Hi, the asset doesn’t seem to work on metal (macOs). the capsule shadows compute shader throws an error in line 157 (cannot implicitly convert from uint2 to uint3 at kernel DeferredPath)

I’m going to push an update with a fix once I can test this on a mac, in the mean time though just change uint3 coord to uint2

[Onat-H]

@cgDoofus

I’m going to push an update with a fix once I can test this on a mac, in the mean time though just change uint3 coord to uint2

Sorry for the late reply, I tried that, but all the other params like color, depth and normal need uint3, so that doesn’t work.

[shma_unity]

Hello,
I’ve been integrating ambient shadows for my project and they are working quite nicely. However, I stumbled upon a bit of a glitch.

When DLSS (Nvidia’s deep learning super sampling) is enabled for dynamic resolution on the camera settings, the character itself starts to get a black flicker effect. When going close to it.

The effect is even slightly there when DLSS is off, but only when going very very close to the object.

It looks like the flicker is coming from the excluded mesh itself.

Edit: I was able to fix the issue by changing line 175 in CapsuleShadows.compute

from

uint mask = 1? depth - exc_marching[coord].x < 0.00001 : 0;

to

uint mask = 1? depth - exc_marching[coord].x < 0.001 : 0;

[christoph_r]

Seems like this requires light probes to work - reflection probes won’t work?

[DarknessBlade]

Hello, does this work with unity 2019.4 lts built-in pipeline & deffered rendering mode ?