I am just curious why is there no official support for dynamic shadow on iPhone ??
I know there is projected shadow extension but its not part of the Unity iPhone official feature.
It couldn’t be that hard to implement can it?
Even an upstart engine like Maratis 3D has it working :
Yeah, that would be great addition to Unity 3D iPhone builds 
Its very power consuming but hey give it a try. Should be fine if you only use one or two dynamic shadows at the same time.
Maybe with unity 3.5 what is called the big “light for mobile” update there is a chance that they try to implement it. Would be nice.
Is it impossible to have shadows on mobile. I know lightmapping, but what about moving objects?
Its not impossible to have it.
But impossible to still have a fluent runtime afterwards. Try it on the desktop and see the performance impact.
The iPad2 might potentially be able to pull it of in low quality settings but otherwise, it would not work at all the gpu on 3GS, 4th gen and iPad1 is barely able to hold up the normal fillrate efforts, not talking about bombs like shadows
So nobody uses shadows when developing a game for anything below Ipad2? A game without shadows is like a whiskey without alcohol. 
You can have shadows, just not the dynamic shadow maps that are built-in to the engine. Also, look at all the iPhone games and tell me how many use “true” dynamic shadows. (Hint: <.1%)
–Eric
So is it possible to have bouncing ball with shadows, which are not made from a projector?
Btw, im on Android.
Why wouldn’t you use a projector for a bouncing ball?
–Eric
It was just an example. I just read somewhere that it is performance intensive to use the projector. And I want to make a little village, where the sun moves, thus also changing the angle of the shadows.
Is that (projector) the only way to have shadows from moving objects? I have selected shadows, checked my quality settings and made the shadow draw pretty far. No matter what light I make, I have no shadows.
It’s not only possible its possible at 30fps on an ipad with everything casting shadows. One of the dudes at my old place has it up and running but he is using some form of bastardized stencil shadows.
I would at a guess say unity’s old hard-edged shadows should be fine (doom3) style shadows. I’d like unity to support them but I personally do not plan on using them. It’s just nice if unity can close the gap between ios pro and unity pro. There’s very little reason not to close the gap considering they cost the same and devices are now strong enough (ipad2).
Looking forwards for hard-edged stencil style shadows one day. Haven’t people been saying that there is little incentive to use unity pro over unity free? well this could make the difference for ios pro and be sound business sense.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgEaz15JybA check out zombies hd. It has side by side spec/bump/parallax mapping with stencil shadows running at smooth as silk on ipad2.
The ipad1 version he did looks very unoptimised. I know it can run at least 20fps with “expensive” shaders going. It’s all about if you have a spare Jessy on your team or not.
so no shadows at all, besides projector, lightmaps and texture baked shadows?
Incorrect: No inbuilt shadows beside those.
But you can write your own shadow system. Look at the Character Shadows on the unifycommunity wiki, they used to work with some minor kicks the last time I looked at them
but as mentioned, the price is relatively high, I’m not sure if adding shadow 1-2 objects or a fullscreen effect will kill your performance to a higher degree and fullscreen effects are generally a NO unless you opted the whole game to make it possible
Well, there is this game 2XL Supercross which has one of the best looking dynamic shadow system I have seen. Its obvious its not geometry projected shadow because the whole racing course is not flat. And I don’t think its stencil shadow either because shadows are not sharp. It looks like some kind of soft shadow map system. The amazing thing is this game plays flawlessly on 2nd gen iDevices (iPOD 2G/iPhone 3G - OpenGL ES 1.1) with fully interactive 3D physics, surround sound, authentic engine recordings, particle effects, while maintain very high frame rate (30+ fps).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6U2lWZFbSc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNJEqBq2IpY
Notice the videos were uploaded Apr 9 and May 8 2009 - months before iPhone 3GS came out. So the game were running on extremely underpowered 2G devices. I also have the game and I can verify it works flawlessly on my now aging iPod 2G still. And its not just one projected shadow on player either - every biker in the game has dynamic shadow - sometimes up to 6 bikers can be seen in the view, and the game never stutter one bit (on top of having physics and particle systems).
I just think there is got to be a way to make great looking shadow that’s not costly at all.
I really do think its worth voting for a shadow system in iOS. It adds so much depth to games and like the guy above said… its been done and done well in some form or another by adventurous programmers.
The Marakis 3D shadow is a geometric projection from a point light onto a single flat surface. You can do that yourself in Unity right now and it should be fairly efficient. But it’s far from a generalized shadow system you can just plug into a scene and expect to work.
It looks to me like the shadows in the motorcycle game are projected using a small number of different shadow frames (watch the video carefully). It’s a pretty neat trick that’s facilitated by (a) everything being similar enough that you only need one set of shadow images, and (b) it’s a shadow, no-one looks at it too carefully.
In general, the trick to getting awesome results is 10% technology and 90% sweat and cheating.
You think they use animated texture as shadow projected onto the ground in 2XL Supercross?
Hello,
in Ancient Quest , a game we are developing in Unity for iOs we use animated textures to simulate dynamic shadows. The syncro is not perfect but the overall result, in my opinion, is good.
Wow, that looks amazing, was that developed in Unity?
So, how did you do it? Is that pre-rendered blob shadow/shadow projector synchronized to character keyframes?
Is the game out on iPhone? I searched the App Store but nothing come up.
