I don’t want to write out this again but it has been over 2years and still no official reply… URP shadows are pretty awful in multiple ways… including the biggest issue for me…
…being they don’t even support alpha transparency like BIRP can with a faked dithered shadow that atleast with smoothing in BIRP was good enough.
Then there is the lack of any support for higher quality shadows which BIRP was also had that problem, but then we had an addon like ‘Next-Gen Soft-Shadows 2’ to better sort it out.
It’s all very disappointing considering alot of addon developers went to supporting URP as the new default BIRP replacement, even though that has turned out to be the least supported pipeline in terms of features and not even that much better that BIRP some cases worst.
And this …
…I mean I don’t need that level of lighting and shadows in a game, but it sure would be nice if at least something was done about this area.
I honestly don’t get why people want stuff like hair when the engine can’t even do a glass shader with atleast some level of realism with shadow lighting not just being flat opaque or just plain invisible.
I’d like to give a quick update and some thoughts on what’s happening in the context of shadows for URP.
Shadows are incredibly important and can make or break the graphical quality of projects. We appreciate that shadows in the built-in render pipeline and in URP are suffering from a number of issues and limitations.
We went through the thread mentioned above and cataloged every feedback. Some of the feedback was already known and planned, some of it is new and we will discuss with product management to evaluate how we will address that feedback and prioritize it.
When we look at our short term roadmap everything is important and there’s one way to prioritize work so we land things in the most optimal way. Many talented engineers are working on the render pipelines but some foundational things are slowing down our progress to get features out to you quickly. We currently focusing on some foundational changes that address other concerns that have been raised by many users and because of that we are not directly working on shadows for 2022.2.
You might also have seen that we are optimizing our development process . This allows us to land features and fixes more quickly and also to improve our automated tests infrastructure. The improvements to our automated test infrastructure will prevent regressions and ensure that features are well tested on all of our (25!) supported platforms.
Additionally, we are merged the Scriptable Render Pipeline foundation to accelerate our development, to have a more robust and maintainable foundation for URP and to more efficiently bring features from HDRP to URP (when it makes sense). We created a new team called the Render Pipeline Core that has the mission to build up the shared tech stack between the render pipelines. Specifically, we are now adopting the RenderGraph for URP. We are at the same time adding support for native render passes to RenderGaph for optimal performance on tiled GPUs (ie mobile platforms). It’s a huge project but we will land this in the 2023 release.
