Hey all!
I just switched to URP today and converted all my materials, I previously had a bunch of point lights and they all casted shadows, however after switching to URP it seems that all the shadows are now gone and can’t get them back.
I’m pretty new to unity and I’m not very sure about whats going on, how can I get the shadows to render again?
Point lights do not cast shadows yet - it’s “In research”. Only Directional lights (limited to 1) and Spot lights do:
Ah bummer, is there any way to get shadows for point lights on URP then? I don’t need it to be real time.
Worth a read if you are considering . HDRP for lots of point light.
You can get baked point
Baked Point lights cast shadows.
Mixed Point Lights (shadow mask) are being worked atm.
Realtime point light shadows are coming soon
Public Roadmap: https://portal.productboard.com/8ufdwj59ehtmsvxenjumxo82/tabs/3-universal-render-pipeline-previously-lwrp
@phil_lira can we PLEASE get this prioritized? We’ve been waiting for full URP support for our upcoming VR game for literally years now. It relies heavily on realtime point lights for the atmospheric sci-fi environments and trying to fake it with spotlights and baked shadows looks awful. It’s the most upvoted feature according to the roadmap:
I’m pretty sure when its stated to come out soon its already top priority.
URP should have never actually released without core features like this, is it really puzzling
What does soon actually mean in this case? It sounded like they were slated to be worked on soon back in 2018 - ETA on supporting Point Light shadows for LWRP?
Seems could be never, if was easy would have been done over the weekend. Probably the new pipeline platforms are extremely hard to use and extend, as adapting an already existing code for shadows should be trivial.
I suppose will have to make it ourselves.
Point light shadows are atrocious performance since you have to cull and draw all casters 6 times, 7 including the main pass.
Imagine with a few point lights?
With a dual paraboloid approach you can get it down to 2x culling/drawing of casters, etc depending how big the light radius is. But LWRP, as it was, would never have been lightweight with point shadow.
Spotlights are pretty useful though.
But is no longer LWRP, is the replacement of standard and having the option is best than not have it, even if the game would be slower. In some game scenarios one point light is enough to make a world of difference with shadows, not always need many as well.
That’s right so that’s why it’s now in research to add the missing functionality. The plan is to provide all the functionality, I can see on github they’re working hard but not necessarily in the order everyone can agree on 
I guess is fine if they eventually add the shadows in a reasonable time frame, though the fact that was first mentioned in 2018 is a concern.
The urp is rather new in its latest stable condition though, so i understand the priority so far was to make stable and is good on this side.
I have done a volumetrics system in urp and would love to see point lights cast volume shadows, is a pain to miss this
Actually yes. And few more weekends to add some fancy stuff like a 4 pass point shadows.
Any discussion regarding point lights being too heavy for real-time use goes out the window with one simple fact: yes you can bake, but good luck setting up a complex indoor scene when your only way of actually getting a good representation of lighting is to run a bake and waste time.
For me, not even being able to see real-time point light shadows in the editor (I am aware that editor and run-time shadows are the same) is the more damning problem. It ramps up your iteration time when developing a scene massively. Even a fairly inefficient quickly hacked together editor-only solution would be better than nothing.
Indeed, plus the URP is supposed to replace the Standard pipeline and so far misses base features and seems slower, so those should be top priority and at least have some first implementation soon.
Currently URP is practically useless for any serious purpose, as is HDRP which is vastly slow due to the extreme shader complexity.
I will add my few words regarding URP. In short it sucks. Whenever I try to do something more outside this sandbox it limits everything. So I switched to SRP and did code my own deferred pipeline with all kinds of shadows (including point lights what is not a problem) and order independent transparency. But again I faced another problems with my other ideas. While trying to solve these problems I faced more problems with editor preview windows not rendering what I want or not running at all on a real device and so on and on. I think built-in pipeline was much better and should be extended and upgraded instead introducing so many variants, because one dosn’t know if should use URP, SRP, HDRP or built-in or maybe pick other game engine. Puke… Now if I go back to URP there are no point lights shadows, no deferred rendering, no multipases in shader graph, no order idependent transpareny. If I go back to built-in I will be wasting time because it is going to be obsolate in near future. I started thinking that Unity is a waste of time.
The URP is disrupting my progress as well. I switched after seeing the URP had come out of preview and the built-in pipeline will be marked obsolete. Yet I don’t have access to ambient occlusion, point light shadows, light cookies, shadowmask mixed lighting, reflection probe blending, box projection, etc… I would bite the bullet and switch back to the built-in pipeline, but now my project is dependent on the URP renderer features…
Lens flares are missing too.
