Bad Baked Shadows Quality

[finite flicker]

I just switched from pc renderer in urp to mobile renderer since im porting my game to mobile, but i have one problem: my baked shadows now have terrible quality, like worse than realtime shadows. I tried to change numerous settings, but nothing made them better :( please help

[finite flicker]

On the left it is realtime shadow, on the right, baked shadows.

[torpid light]

you have to set the lightmap quality somewhere.. i think it was in player settings

yep

Player -> the platform you want to build for -> Other Settings foldout -> Lightmap Encoding

additionally maybe also go to the baked lightmaps (should be in a folder where the scene is) and set the lightmaps compression/max resolution there

[finite flicker]

that is already set to high

[finite flicker]

i think you meant lighting settings cuz the folder where the scene is only has the currently baked data but i set the compression to none and i set the lightmap resolution to 60

on my pc renderer i set the lightmap resolution to 40 and it had a really good quality so i dont think thats the problem 😔

[torpid light]

on the android/ios page?

also second thing: not the baking setting, i meant the baked texture

[finite flicker]

i can change that?

well the textures have max size of 2048

[torpid light]

you can check the import settings in the inspector

if it's same for mobile platform then idk

[finite flicker]

yeah idk 😔

i even compared the settings from the pc renderer and stuff

cant find why the baked shadows are so low quality on mobile renderer

[torpid light]

Maybe also check the URP asset

[finite flicker]

alr

yeah no doesnt have much options about baked shadows

[torpid light]

What does the baked shadow look like on PC renderer?

[finite flicker]

they look like perfect shadows

lemme send u a screenshot

the shadow of the cube in front of me is baked, the player shadow is realtime

[slim jackal]

That looks too sharp for baked light, is the light mode mixed or static?

[finite flicker]

Mixed

[finite flicker]

Btw this is the baked shadow from the pc renderer, the one from mobile is all the way up

[slim jackal]

if its mixed, there's chance that it's actually rendered using direct shadow on PC and using lightmap data on mobile.
You can try switching the light mode to static to force the static shadow on PC, and add another directional light for dynamic shadows

[finite flicker]

so that will make the mobile renderer have better shadows?

[finite flicker]

didnt work when i put baked i have no shadows

[slim jackal]

No, but that should make the pc version looks like your mobile version, theoritically

[slim jackal]

Did you bake the lightmap?

[cyan shell]

Baked shadows will always be worse at capturing detail, that's why mixed mode is there
But it is no less expensive than realtime shadows
You xan increase lightmapping resolution (not "max size") to increase the accuracy, but you will run out of memory for lightmap assets before they match realtime/mixed shadows
So basically you have to live with it, and work around it

[torpid light]

did you set light to baked and objects to static? also you can light dynamic objects without realtime if you use lightprobes/apv

if you strive for performance that's the best afaik

although if you want realistic shadows cast from dynamic objects then that wouldn't work

[finite flicker]

Yeah

Like when i swapped from the pc renderer to the mobile renderer the baked shadow quality instantly got worse

I didnt rebake it or anything

[finite flicker]

Arent baked shadows supposed to be performance friendly since they dont get recalculated every frame?

[finite flicker]

Also it correctly captured all the detail, the only problem/bug is that when i swapped from my pc renderer to my mobile renderer, the same lightmap data etc.. had a worse visual

Still didn't find a way to fix it 😔

[torpid light]

they probably meant mixed lights

[finite flicker]

I thought mixed lights were just like baked shadows if the object is static and realtime shadows if not static

[torpid light]

yeah i know one thinks that by default but it's actually not

https://docs.unity3d.com/2018.2/Documentation/Manual/LightMode-Mixed.html

"In the case of Baked Indirect and Shadowmask, the direct lighting contribution behaves just like a Realtime Light, so you can change parameters like the color, intensity and even the Transform of the Light. However, baked values are precomputed, and cannot change at run time.

For example: if you bake a red Mixed Light into the light map, but change its color from red to green at run time, all direct lighting switches to the green color. However, all indirect lighting is baked into the light maps, so it remains red. The same applies to moving a Mixed Light at run time - direct lighting will follow the Light, but indirect lighting will remain at the position at which the Light was baked."

[finite flicker]

Oh so mixed lighting is basically useless

[slim jackal]

based on this image taken from manual, you can try to use Shadowmask mixed lighting mode

[finite flicker]

it is already on shadow mask

[slim jackal]

Oh right, you want to make the mobile version to look as good as PC version
try changing that to anything other than shadowmask then, like distance shadowmask.
That will come with lower performance though...

android quality setting use shadowmask as its the cheapest to render iirc