Every shadow-casting Point Light in your scene forces Unity to re-render all affected objects six times per frame—even when those objects are completely static!
Stop wasting GPU performance. With Point Shadow Baker: URP Performance Optimizer, you can bake your static Point Light shadows into an optimized depth map with a single click. Unlike traditional lightmaps, your materials retain full PBR fidelity (including metallic and smoothness response), and the entire baking process takes only seconds. Achieve massive performance gains without sacrificing the look of your game.
Proven Performance: In a stress test with 42 shadow-casting Point Lights, this asset boosted performance from 80 FPS to 400 FPS—a massive 5x increase.
Key Features
- High Fidelity: Full PBR support (Metallic/Smoothness) maintained.
- Versatile Geometry: Works with Mesh Renderers, Skinned Mesh Renderers, and LOD Groups (automatically targets highest LOD).
- Shadow Control: Supports both Soft and Hard shadows with variable map sizes (128px to 2048px).
- Smart Integration: Seamlessly works alongside other light types (Directional, Spot, etc.) and respects layer masks and visibility toggles.
- Workflow: Fully visible in Editor; includes robust filtering to ignore disabled/inactive renderers automatically.
- Proceduralism: Shadows can now be baked either with Click to Bake or Bake On Awake, or alternatively by calling ShadowLightBaker.BakeShadows() allowing for procedural workflows.
- Dynamic Objects: The asset has support for moving objects (including skinned meshes and cutout materials). These are rendered on top of the static shadow map and drawn in a single draw call instead of six!
- Analytical Primitive Dynamic Objects: The asset supports Boxes and Spheres as Analytical Primitive Objects that can move and rotate (and scale in the case of boxes). These can cast perfectly accurate shadows regardless of shadowmap resolution!
- Point Light Effects: By adding a Light Effect Attachment to your point lights you can add a Bulb, Halo, Aura and Fog in any combination!
Known Limitations & Compatibility
- Rendering Pipeline: Supports URP (Deferred Rendering only). Note: Ensure "Accurate G-Buffer Normals" is unchecked in your URP asset settings.
- Static Preference: The asset is designed for static lights that do not move. Baked objects should not move, and dynamic objects not marked as Dynamic Shadow Objects will not cast shadows. While technically both the light and props can move, this forfeits most of the performance advantages that this asset brings.
- Dynamic Limitation: Dynamic Lights need to have one side occluded to work. This can be a limiting factor for certain light fixtures. For instance a thin candelabra that illuminates moving characters with no obvious flat plane to project the missing depth plane on is a bad use case for this asset.
- Unsupported: Built-in/HDRP, Forward/Forward+ rendering, Terrain (trees/grass), Cookies, and transparent/colored shadows.
- Light Types: Optimized exclusively for Point Lights.
How to Use
Integrating Point Shadow Baker: URP Performance Optimizer into your workflow is a streamlined, three-step process:
- Configure: Add any number of Point Lights to your scene and adjust their intensity and radius.
- Assign: Select your lights and attach the Shadow Light Baker component.
- Bake: Choose your desired shadow quality (Hard or Fake Soft) and click Bake.
The tool will iterate through each selected light, generating an optimized depth cubemap and replacing the dynamic Point Light with an ultra-efficient mesh renderer. Also remember to use the copy button when copying lights!
Making it work with Dynamic Objects (moving)
You can upgrade any light with a Dynamic Shadow Attachment to allow it to cast shadows from dynamic objects. This does come with the caveat that those lights will now be baked using 5-sided cube maps, meaning one side of the light has a depth plane replacing its content on that side (See images for a
Description sourced from the Unity Asset Store listing.
