Umbra Soft Shadows – Better Directional & Contact Shadows for URP v7.1

Umbra significantly improves the quality of directional light shadows in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) for Unity. It introduces advanced shadow rendering techniques, resulting in beautiful shadows that are sharper near obstacles and softer, more diffuse, at a distance, thanks to its implementation of contact hardening. Umbra also adds Contact Shadows to enhance fine details at close and far distances. Combining the powerful soft and contact shadows you will get the most realistic and immersive scenes.

Key features:

• Configurable Shadow Appearance: Adjust the look and smoothness of shadows to achieve the desired visual style for your project.
• Contact Hardening: customize the shadows to look crisp near the shadow casters while smoother at the distance as in real life.
• Stylized Shadows: now you can texture the shadows or create a posterization effect when using blur (great for toon style).
• Contact Shadows: get shadows for all small details without compromise, either at close or at far distances. Combine it into the resolved shadow texture or render it as a separate pass. Contact Shadows can be configured for the directional light and also for point lights.
• Cascade Blending: Achieve smoother transitions between shadow cascades, reducing noticeable edges and enhancing overall visual coherence.
• Profiles: Easily store settings in profile assets which can be easily swapped or set at runtime.
• Optimization Options: Advanced options to improve performance such as loop and frame skip optimization which allows reusing of shadow map texture from previous frame.
• Transparent Receiver Plane for XR: Includes a custom shader made with Shader Graph that supports soft shadows rendering on a transparent plane/ground commonly used in XR applications. Demo scene included.