How do you change the distance at which shadows cast on objects?
Right now I have a helicopter, which is actual scale in centimeters, that the rotor doesn’t cast a shadow on the body of the helicopter until about halfway down the nose. Another example is the outside of the aircraft not casting a shadow on the floor of the inside, instead I get the rotor shadow. It seems the distance between the objects is the issue since raising the rotor up makes the shadow climb up the helicopter until it completely appears after the rotor is floating above the body.
Perhaps you could try adjusting the quality sitting of your lighting.
Edit>Project Settings>Quality
From there you can adjust the “Shadow Distance” among other things. There are a bunch of other settings there you could fiddle around with. Perhaps there may be something there.
There is a “shadow bias” setting on the light. You might trying adjust that. But most likely the problem is your world scale. You say your helicopter is actual scale in centimeters. Is it a R/C model helicopter? If your objects are all just fractions of a “unit” in size, then this could affect shadow and possibly collision detection and other things. Unity is not entirely scale independent and you should attempt to have your objects be multiples of a “unit” and not just tiny fractions of it.
No it is not an R/C copter. It is actual scale of a real UH-60. So in real world measurements it is 1976cm. It is a 1:1 model. Adjusting the shadow bias did not do anything either. I have played with all the settings in unity and so far none has fixed the issue. The only fix I can find is to make the light perpendicular (90 degrees) to the model. The further I get away from 90 degrees, the more the shadow falls apart. I originally thought it was a distance issue, but it seems the rotation of the light is part of the problem.
Nice helicopter model! Back to the topic, how big is the model in Unity? What's your shadow distance in the quality settings? Make sure that it isn't set too high- you might end up having problems because of that.
Unity is dimensionless, so meters or centimeters don't actually mean anything. Also, as for the quality settings, I've found that shadows from directional lights actually look a bit worse on fantastic, because the extremely long shadow length means that even at maximum resoloution, the shadows get grainy close up. However, from the screenshot you posted earlier, I don't think that's the problem...
OK, I think I've got it figured out now. I made a new project and everything magically worked. So, I poked around in a few other areas, and it turns out when I turn the Water layer off, everything works. We were using a script in the water layer to generate a floor reflection. Here is a link to the script we were using: http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=MirrorReflection2
Thank you, this really helped me.
– Tom_LinSame Here. Thanks
– jimjames