When building a 3D scene, when you pull the camera to zoom out, or when your character runs to a distant area, have you ever noticed that the shadows of buildings, rocks, etc. suddenly disappear and it feels unnatural? This is due to shadow restrictions to reduce the rendering load of URP (Universal Render Pipeline).

Main cause

The root cause of distant shadows disappearing in URP lies in the shadow settings of the URP Asset (UniversalRenderPipelineAsset) that is currently active in the project.

  • Max Distance limit: Shadows of objects farther from the camera are excluded from rendering. This is because the default value (often 50m or 100m) is too small for the scale of the scene.
  • Cascading shadows (Shadow Cascades) not set: When the shadow drawing distance is increased, if cascade (split drawing) is not used, Shadowmap's resolution is stretched across a large area far from the camera, causing shadows to become extremely jagged or blurry and disappear.
Conceptual diagram of Near/Middle/Far division and resolution mapping in cascading shadows in Unity URP

Figure 1: Cascade division (Near/Middle/Far) in camera view frustum and Shadow mapResolution distribution image