Shadows disappear when using Pro Image Effects or HDR

Questions & Answers
1

Whenever I try using HDR or the post-processing image effects in Unity Pro, my shadows completely disappear. This is using the latest stable release of Unity 4.6. My computer and GPU are on the higher-end, so it’s not likely a hardware problem. I’ve gone through numerous topics and tried their suggestions to no avail.

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

  • Increase/Reduce the near and far clipping planes of the camera
  • Turn all graphics settings very high/low
  • Try using Vertex Lit instead of Deferred Rendering
  • Enable/Disable/Tweak shadow types in both the lights and in-game meshes
  • Reduce shadow distance greatly
  • Try the scene with/without baked lightmaps
  • Scale up/down the scene
  • Run the scene in-editor and in Desktop builds
2

I’ve solved it. Disabling Direct3D 11 in the Player Settings got everything working again. Turns out that having that option on forced Unity to use my Integrated Graphics, even when I set my GPU as the default for Unity. When the VRAM was exceeded, shadows were dropped. As expected, my GPU doesn’t have this same problem and renders everything correctly.

3

When I do this on my Microsoft Surface Pro 3, and create a web player build it completely distorts all of the graphics including the UI objects. So I have to go back to Direct X 11 otherwise it won’t show my game correctly in the Web Player build.