Realtime tree shadows disappear on camera movement

Are you using the free version of unity? They recently launched shadows for free which were previously only accesable from the pro version. Anyways, On 2 different computers with another unity editor free, the shadows are very buggy. They dissapear as you said, I hope there's a solution, and not a unity bug.

I'm on Unity Pro...

Hi, just an idea: if it's really due to the culling and there is nothing to tune/fix it, maybe you can increase the bounding box of the trees by adding some vertices or faces to the geometry (vertex without face or faces with only 2 vertices so it's not rendered). There would be a small performance cost though as the culling would be less effective.

I just found out some things by messing around:

• It definitly only happens with trees placed by the terrain system

• It's always a hole chunk of shadows that pop up or disappear and not individual ones

• It does not just depend on whether I look at those trees but also on my distance to them. I can look at the opposite direction but if I'm close enough, the shadows don't disappear

So this brought me to the theory, that the culling or the shadows of terrain trees are calculated in some kind of groups based on camera distance AND rotation.

So I tested if I can somehow "extend" or at least fake to extend this group or the distance. I have some fern which I loaded as a tree ins$$anonymous$$d of detail mesh and if I place only one little fern where no shadow is rendered, exactly this extension happens. So it basically extends the "render border" or what ever.

The shadow chunk disappears now, if I get far enough from the fern. I can work around this issue this way, but it doesn't make me happy...

If it has to do with the distance from the camera to the trees it might be the LOD of the trees. When they are enough far away, they are probably being switched to the billboard versions, and those probably don't cast shadow.