Unity 5 and new depth handling

[spraycanmansam_1]

Hi all,

Just after some clarification on how depth is handled now in Unity 5.
From the upgrade notes it mentions that replacement shaders are no longer used for rendering depth:

@Unity Documentation

Depth texture itself is not generated using shader replacement anymore; it is rendered with ShadowCaster shader passes. This means that as long as your objects can cast proper shadows, then they will also appear in camera’s depth texture properly (was very hard to do before, if you wanted custom vertex animation or funky alpha testing). It also means that Camera-DepthTexture.shader is not used for anything now. And also, all built-in shadow shaders used no backface culling; that was changed to match culling mode of regular rendering

However, in other threads I see mention of the CameraDepthNormal replacement shader being used, and in fact I just found I had to add a custom subshader to it to fix a problem with one of our vertex displacing shaders.

I’ve also noticed some inconsistencies between DirectX versions, where DX9 will render forward objects to depth without the shadow caster passes and DX11 needs the shadow caster passes to render to depth correctly.

TL/DR: Some clarification on the relations between the CameraDepthNormal replacement shader, shadow caster passes and ZWrite settings would be great

Cheers,
Sam

[spraycanmansam_1]

Bump.