Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

Lighting and shadowing

In modern games, a single object rarely finishes rendering completely in a single step, primarily due to lighting and shadowing. These tasks are often handled in multiple passes of a fragment shader, once for each of the several light sources, and the final result is combined so that multiple lights are given a chance to be applied. The result appears much more realistic, or, at least, more visually appealing.

Several passes are required to gather shadowing information. So, let's begin:

1. We will first set up our scene to have shadow casters and shadow receivers, which will create or receive shadows, respectively.
2. Then, each time a shadow receiver is rendered, the GPU renders any shadow caster objects from the point ...