Shadow under camera

[douglassophies]

As i move my camera, the light/shadow moves with it. See short video for example:

CameraShadowVideo

My camera is orthographic set at a constant 30 on the Y axis for an old school Baldurs Gate style isometric feel. Directional light is NOT attached.

Increasing my shadow distance in the quality settings gets rid of shadows, but ALL of them. The camera shadow is one of the last to go so this is not really a solution.

I found these similar posts from awhile ago but nothing helped:

Camera casting shadow or something

I see a big circle shadow under main camera

Camera is Casting a Weird Shadow Across the Scene

Hi All, I am new to Unity and this is the first time I’ve messed around with lighting. My issue right now is that there is a large shadow being cast over one half of my main plane in one of my scenes. It wasn’t there earlier, and I’m not sure what I changed to make it appear. I have very few objects in the scene and I’ve tried turning on and off all of them to see where the shadow is coming from. It looks like the shadow is being cast by the main camera itself as the shadow moves when I move th…

I posted on Answers but no luck:
https://answers.unity.com/questions/1650231/shadow-under-camera.html?childToView=1650286#comment-1650286

[douglassophies]

Enlighten does not have this issue.
Progressive both GPU and CPU have it.

[kristijonas_unity]

From the looks of it, your shadow cascades settings need to be adjusted. Go to Project Settings > Quality and try adjusting the cascade count, cascade split, and shadow distance settings. Verify those settings using Shadow Cascade debug mode in the Scene view afterwards.

You could also try using Distance Shadowmask lighting mode, which will allow your realtime shadows to blend into baked shadows when shadow distance limit has been reached - Unity - Manual: Lighting Mode: Shadowmask

[douglassophies]

Thanks for the suggestion. I ended up setting my directional ‘sun’ light to have a bias of 0.1 which solved it. I am a little puzzled as i have an older version of the game from an older Unity where i had this working without the bias set.
I tried setting it back and playing with the cascade settings but to no avail. The distance settings do work… but my removing all shadow so that is no use. However, i am happy now as i understand the only issue with bias removing too much shadow where there should be shadow but that does not seem to be the case.

[marck_ozz]

I haved the same problem in my project but in my case I was using HDRP. it result that (at leat in my case) that circle wasn’t becouse the camera casting shadow but for the lack of shadow configuration. You can find information in here:

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@5.8/manual/Shadows-in-HDRP.html

I fixed the problem changing the “Maximun distance” of shadows in the “Scene Settings” from 500 to 2000.

You can add “Scene Settings” by
Menu:
Game Object:
Rendering:
Scene Setting.

Plus, playing with this scene configuration really add a high quallity graphics view to the game.

[Jerry_Davis]

adjust the bias setting of light shadow, will fix it. that is my solution

[JackTenSeven]

@marck_ozz

I haved the same problem in my project but in my case I was using HDRP. it result that (at leat in my case) that circle wasn’t becouse the camera casting shadow but for the lack of shadow configuration. You can find information in here:

Redirecting to latest version of com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition

I fixed the problem changing the “Maximun distance” of shadows in the “Scene Settings” from 500 to 2000.

You can add “Scene Settings” by
Menu:
Game Object:
Rendering:
Scene Setting.

Plus, playing with this scene configuration really add a high quallity graphics view to the game.

Oh great I just need to go to Menu. Ill go right to that menu now that definitely exists and is called menu perfect thanks for awesome forum entry

[mindego]

I am pretty sure that topic starter have already resolved his issue, but here is my case.
I’ve also got that dreaded shadow circle and in my case Unity did its job right - it was my misunderstanding. In my scene there were “early morning”, so the “sun” was quite low and the camera position was in the valley. There were no shadows though, except for that circular one. In desperation I’ve moved camera outside that valley and suddenly that circle falls apart, showing correct shadow in that circular area. And thus this mistery was resolved at last - the valley was in shadow of terrain, so every in it was in shadow, but shadow distance was not big enough to render all shadow of terrain cliff. That is why deleting and re-adding direction light could help - newly created light is “high” enough to keep shadows short. I’ve user HDRP rendering, so it was enough to increase shadow distance in the volume profile.
TL;NR:
If you have faced this issue - try to increase shadow distance. It may help.