Ray-Traced Contact Shadows

Ray-Traced Contact Shadows is a ray tracing feature in the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). It's an alternative to HDRP's Contact Shadow technique that uses a more accurate ray-traced solution that can use off-screen data.

Without Contact shadows

Contact shadows

Ray-traced contact shadows

For information about ray tracing in HDRP, and how to set up your HDRP Project to support ray tracing, see Getting started with ray tracing.

To troubleshoot this effect, HDRP provides a Shadows Debug Mode and a Ray Tracing Acceleration Structure Debug Mode in Lighting Full Screen Debug Mode.

Using Ray-Traced Contact Shadows

This feature is an alternative to the Contact Shadows Volume override, so the initial setup is similar. To set up ray-traced contact shadows:

1. First follow the Enabling Contact Shadows and Using Contact Shadows steps to set up the Contact Shadows override.
2. In the Frame Settings for your Cameras, enable Ray Tracing.
3. HDRP calculates ray-traced contact shadows on a per-light basis. This means you need to enable it for each light.
4. Select a Light and, in the Inspector, go to Shadows > Contact Shadows and tick the Enable checkbox. This exposes the Ray Tracing property.
5. Enable the Ray Tracing checkbox.