As I read this, only one directional light will throw a shadow, unless a variant shortcut is used. When I put four directional lights into a simple scene (located where the spheres are and directed towards the base of the cylinder), all four cast shadows onto the quad under the cylinder (so these are clearly pixel-lights, not vertex-based).
The doc page reads as though the variant shortcut isn’t the default, but I am seeing four shadows, not one. Am I reading the doc wrong? Is that variant shortcut actually the default?
Good morning my favorite oscilloscope avatar fellow poster!
I believe you would enjoy popping open the Frame Debugger for this question.
Use your scene above and start clicking on different parts on the left of the frame debugger while looking at the image… pretty cool stuff. I don’t pretend to understand it all, but there’s a firehose of data in there. It’s super-useful for understanding why something is taking a lot of drawcalls, for instance.
Gods, that is a lot of info! It does show four distinct draw calls for the quad, one for each light, and each one gets a shadow. No surprises there, since that’s what I’m seeing already. But no indication that the required variant is (or isn’t) being used. The doc on this is unusually cryptic, even for Unity.
