I’m still looking for a way for runtime-generated geometry to cast and receive shadows, so I’m wondering whether it’s feasible (in terms of frame rates) for Unity Pro’s realtime shadows to operate on virtually every polygon in a scene that has hundreds of thousands of polys. If the shadows are done via shader, I assume the frame rate might not suffer too horrendously, or would it ? I don’t know what method they’re using, and I haven’t purchased Unity Pro yet.
You can get a Pro trial if you request one.
–Eric
Do I make the request to general feedback? I searched the site without finding any submission form to specifically request a trial version.
But surely someone has used realtime shadows with a large number of objects and has an idea of the frame rate?
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It would depend on the hardware.
–Eric
Well, yes; but if Unity uses a multipass shader to implement shadow mapping, then I would assume that the percentage of polys that are set to cast shadows shouldn’t make much difference since even one poly using a multipass shader would cause the entire rendering process to be delayed for an extra pass anyway; therefore the main factor should be the total number of polys in the scene rather than the percentage that are casting shadows… or am I confused?
A lot of things will affect performance, particularly the number of lights casting shadows, but personally I’ve found the shadows to be a pretty decent speed even on older hardware…you also get deferred rendering in Pro (IIRC it’s not available in Free?). Just make sure you let players turn them on/off and put in an alternative (i.e. blob shadows) if your game is really pushing it.