Shadow Receiver URP (AR/MR Directional & Additional Light Shadows)

Shadow Receiver is the best shader available for rendering real-time shadows in your projects. It uses a shader graph with custom (sub)nodes to render real-time shadows onto any 3D object. The shadows can be cast from any real-time light in Unity, including additional lights!

Made for the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) using Shader Graph.
Legacy support for Built-in Render Pipeline (BiRP) added in V2.2!

Features

• Real-time shadow receiving/casting onto invisible objects
• Directional Light & Additional Lights support
• Forward+ support for more than 8 lights (experimental)
• Set the shadow color (for both main and additional lights!)
• Set the shadow transparency
• Support for multiple shadow cascades
• Support for soft shadows and hard shadows
• Support for soft shadow quality tiers
• Tested with AR with ARCore/ARKit/AR Foundation, Niantic Lightship, and Vuforia
• Tested with VR/MR headsets, like Quest 3 and Pico 4
• Made in Shader Graph, easily extendable with subgraphs
• Customizable shaders for custom effects
• Support for all platforms (Android/Windows/iOS)
• Optimized for performance on mobile devices!

Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality

Shadow Receiver is mostly used in AR/MR to render shadows on planes detected with plane detection. This way, an AR object can have realistic real-time shadows in AR. This creates a more immersive AR experience.

Of course, feel free to use this for any other project you see fit!

Video Compositing

Shadow Receiver can be used well with video compositing in Unity. As long as your video uses alpha clipping to be able to cast shadows, you can get real-time shadows below it.

Technicals

Only works in Universal Render Pipelines!
Legacy support for Built-in Render Pipeline!
Tested in Unity 2020.3LTS, 2021.3LTS, 2022.3LTS, Unity 6 (2023.4)
Works using 1 real-time directional light and unlimited additional lights (in Forward+).
Work on any device. Fully tested on Android, IOS, and Windows.