2D Radiance Cascades

Overview

The 2D Radiance Cascades package provides a high-quality global illumination solution for 2D games in Unity.

Requirements

• Unity 6.0 or newer
• Universal Render Pipeline (URP) 17.0 or newer
• Burst 1.8.0 or newer

Quick Start

1. Install the package from the asset store
2. Add the RadianceCascadesRendererFeature to your URP Renderer
3. Configure basic quality settings
4. Add lights to your scene
5. Assign the preconfigured Radiance Cascades/RC-Sprite-Lit-Flat material to your sprites.

For detailed instructions, see the Getting Started guide.

Documentation Structure

• Getting Started
• General Concepts
• Usage Guide
• Quality Settings
• API Reference

Getting Started with 2D Radiance Cascades

Installation

The package is provided as a hybrid package. To install it, import the .unitypackage file into your project or install it from the Unity Asset Store. The package contents will appear under Packages/com.dim0v.radiance-cascades-2d and it will generally work as a local UPM package.

Samples

The package comes with a sample Space game. To import it, use the standard Unity Package Manager UI:

• Open the package manager through Window -> Package Manager
• Select "2D Radiance Cascades" from the list
• Go to the Samples tab and click "Import"

Basic Setup

Adding and Configuring the Renderer Feature

1. Set up the URP renderer. Both 2D and 3D renderers are supported

2. Select your Renderer 2D Data (or Universal Renderer Data) asset in your project

3. In the Inspector, click "Add Renderer Feature"

   • (optional) This is where you can tweak the Quality Settings in the inspector of the renderer feature

4. (optional) In the "General" section of the Renderer 2D change the "Default Material Type" to Custom and assign the RC-Sprite-Lit-Flat material to "Default Custom Material" so your sprites are lit by default.

   • Note: you may need to show hidden packages in the material picker:

     

Creating A Lit Scene

1. Create a new 2D scene
2. Add light sources and obstacles using either of the options:
   • GameObject -> Radiance Cascades 2D menu
   • manually adding the "Light Contributor" component to an arbitrary GameObject
3. Add some sprites to your scene
4. Assign the preconfigured Radiance Cascades/RC-Sprite-Lit-Flat material to the sprites that should be affected by the lighting.
   • If your sprites have normal maps, you may want to use Radiance Cascades/RC-Sprite-Lit-WithNormal material to enable diffuse shading

Demos and Samples

Installation

1. Open the Unity Package Manager (Window → Package Manager)
2. Select the 2D Radiance Cascades package
3. Go to the Samples tab
4. Import the sample you're interested in
5. The assets will appear under Assets/Samples/2D Radiance Cascades/{version}/{demo name} with a scene file at the sample root (if applicable)

Preconfigured URP Asset

This sample has a pre-configured URP asset with the Radiance Cascades 2D renderer feature added and set up. You can import it to skip the manual setup.

Examples

A scene featuring different light setups showcasing various package features and usage examples.

Space Demo

A simple Asteroids-like game featuring various features of the lighting system.

The gameplay: Fly around and shoot at asteroids.

Controls:

• Thrust:
  • Keyboard: Up/Down arrow keys or W/S
  • Gamepad: Right trigger to accelerate, left trigger to decelerate.
• Rotation:
  • Keyboard: Left/Right arrow keys or A/D
  • Gamepad: Left stick
• Shoot:
  • Keyboard: Control or Space
  • Gamepad: South action button (A on Xbox controller)

Explore the demo

1. Check out the light sources:
   • Global lights under the Global Lights game object in the game scene
   • Asteroid debris light source in Prefabs/Debris
   • Bullet in Prefabs/Bullet. Note how an unlit sprite is drawn on top of the light source to preserve the sharp light source shape even when the light map is downscaled
   • The rocket thruster light in the Prefabs/Player prefab under Player/Thruster/Light
2. Check out the shadow casters:
   • The asteroid in Prefabs/Asteroid
   • The rocket in Prefabs/Player
3. Check out the light receivers and their materials:
   • The asteroid and the rocket.
     • Note how their sprites have normal maps attached through the standard Unity "Secondary Textures" mechanism.
     • Check out the Materials/SpriteWithNormal.mat material. It uses the package-provided shader for diffuse lighting with normals with the customized distance parameter.
   • The nebula background in Main Camera/Background
     • Note how it uses the lightmap information in a fully custom material with a custom shader.
     • Check out the material shader graph in Materials/Shaders/NebulaBG.shadergraph and the usage of the GetRCLightMapColor node.

Next Steps

• Learn about General Concepts
• Set up the Quality Settings according to your needs
• Explore the detailed Usage Guide

General Concepts and Light Types

Core Concepts

Radiance Cascades

Radiance Cascades is a novel lighting technique that accurately approximates global illumination in 2D. The system uses a series of lighting probe cascades to capture the lighting information in the scene. Each cascade gradually trades spatial resolution for angular resolution (placing fewer probes making each probe capture more directions), efficiently consolidating the global lighting information.

Variants

A high-level overview of the provided radiance cascades variants. Check out the links in the References section for more details.

Vanilla Radiance Cascades

The original Radiance Cascades implementation. In many cases it's the most performant option. However, it's also the most prone to light leaks and ringing artifacts.

Bilinear Fix

Bilinear fix is a slight modification of the original radiance cascades intended to address the artifacts in the vanilla version. It is achieved by precisely matching the ray ends of the lower probe cascades to the ray starts of the higher cascades. It requires 4x as many rays traced for each probe, so the fix comes with a substantial performance hit.

Holographic Radiance Cascades

Holographic Radiance Cascades is the latest development of the original idea. It uses a different approach to probe placement achieving perfect tiling of the areas covered by light probes. In contrast, the probes in both the vanilla and the bilinear fix approaches partially overlap and might even have gaps between them (in the vanilla version). Also, the alternative probe placement enables more precise capturing of penumbras, producing sharper, more physically correct shadows.

And finally, it enables the use of an acceleration structure that makes the effect performance cost mostly independent of the scene complexity. Check out the Usage Guide and [Performance Tips] for more details.

This is the recommended variant for most cases.

Lightmap

The result of the radiance cascades pass (regardless of the variant) is a set of screen-space lightmaps. The light map is a texture that stores light fluence data at each texel. All variants of radiance cascades produce five light maps: one main light map, storing the combined fluence data, and four directional light maps storing fluence coming from four cardinal directions separately.

The light maps are used by the built-in standard shaders (Radiance Cascades/RC-Sprite-Lit-Flat and Radiance Cascades/RC-Sprite-Lit-WithNormal). But they are also exposed as global textures and can be used by custom shaders. See Usage Guide and the Nebula material in the Space demo.

Example light maps for the scene above

Main lightmap:

Directional lightmaps:

Light Types and Occluders

Both lights and occluders/shadow casters are represented by a unified "Light Contributor" class. Thus, an occluder is just a light which intensity equals zero. Note that all light sources support negative intensities, turning them into a sort of "light sinks." This is not physically correct, but it can be used for various artistic effects.

The system provides multiple classes of light contributors.

Global Lights

Global lights don't have a specific location and light the entire scene. There are two types of global lights.

Sky Light

Sky light represents a constant amount of light coming from all directions. Note that the sky light can still be occluded if there is a fully enclosed area.

A dim blue sky light with two line occluders, a diamond-shaped freeform occluder, and a circle light source. Note that the sky light does not light the insides of the diamond occluder.

Directional Lights

Directional lights represent the constant amount of light coming from a specific direction with controllable softness. It effectively represents a light source at an infinite distance. The softness controls the size of such a light source (0 is a point light, 1 is a light that spans the entire semicircle)

A subtle greenish skylight and two directional lights with some occluders. The first directional light shines a warm orange light to the right and has the softness of 0, the second light shines cold blueish color in the upper-left direction (120°) and has the softness of 0.135.

Analytical Lights

Analytical lights are made of ideal mathematical shapes. Currently, the two basic shapes supported are a circle and a line. One notable property of analytical lights is their ability to act as one-sided lights or occluders. In this mode only one side of their surface interacts with the light, while the other is completely transparent. This can be especially handy if you're using diffuse shading with normals and need to make your game objects act as obstacles or light sources while receiving the lighting themselves.

Check out the Usage Guide and the Space demo for more info.

In all the images below, the top shape is a normal double-sided orange light, the right shape is a normal double-sided occluder, the bottom shape is a single-sided blueish light, and the left shape is a single-sided occluder.

Circle Lights

Circle lights represent circular lights and occluders.

Line Lights

Line lights represent lights and occluders in the shape of straight linear segments.

Freeform Lights

Freeform lights allow defining arbitrary shapes with connected straight lines. The diamonds in the following image are freeform lights.

Sprite Lights

Sprite lights are light sources and occluders represented by sprites. To determine the final light color, the sprite color is multiplied by the light color and the intensity. Note that the sprites are considered opaque. Thus, only the outer surface of the sprite is going to radiate light into the scene. Internal pixels will effectively illuminate only the area they cover.

The image below is lit by three sprite lights sources using the same sprite:

The right light has white color with intensity 2, the top one is blueish with intensity 1, and the bottom one has intensity 0, making it an occluder.

References

• Original Radiance Cascades paper
• Holographic Radiance Cascades paper

See Also

• Usage Guide
• Quality Settings

2D Radiance Cascades Usage Guide

This guide provides detailed information on how to effectively use the 2D Radiance Cascades lighting system in your Unity projects. It covers light contributor settings, built-in shaders, and custom shader integration.

Light Contributor Usage

The LightContributor component is the core element for adding lights to your 2D scenes. Different light types are available for various lighting scenarios.

Make sure to read about the different available light types in the General Concepts document.

Common Settings And Usage Tips

All light sources have a color controlled by these two settings:

The resulting light source color is obtained by multiplying the Color RGB components by Intensity. The two settings are provided for convenience, as a separate Intensity slider is generally more intuitive to use than a unified HDR color picker.

Setting either the Intensity to zero, or the Color to black turns the light into an occluder.

The intensity can be set to a negative value. This will turn a light source into a sort of "light sink." Which is not physically correct, but may be used for achieving various artistic effects.

normal orange circle light	negative orange circle light
normal orange directional light (shining directly left-to-right)	negative orange directional light
normal directional light and negative circle light	base image

Global Lights

Global lights (the Sky Light and the Directional lights) provide the ambient lighting. They are the most useful in outdoor scenes when no occluders or other light sources block them. The positioning of their transforms has no effect on how they work as lights.

Sky Light

The Sky Light type provides ambient illumination across your entire scene.

Directional Light

Directional lights simulate light coming from a specific direction, similar to sunlight. Effectively representing the light that is infinitely far away.

Tips

Be careful with sharp directional lights (softness close to zero). Being point light sources, they are easily missable when the lighting algorithm samples the environment light. Which may lead to various artifacts. There are some configurations that provide good results, though. E.g., the HRC variant when the lights are axis-aligned. See the examples below.

Examples

Softness 0	Softness 0.2
Softness 0.5	Softness 1

Artifacts examples

HRC, Softness 0 (note the "hairy" border)	Softness 0.15
Bilinear fix, Softness 0 (note the blocky shadow appearance)	Softness 0.15
Bilinear fix, Softness 0 (note the blocky shadow appearance)	Softness 0.15

Analytical Lights

Analytical lights (circle, line, and freeform lights) represent light contributors made out of geometric primitives. Unlike Sprite lights, analytical lights can affect the scene even when they are outside the camera view.

All analytical lights provide the following properties:

Circle Light

Circle lights emit light from the surface of a circle.

Line Light

Line lights emit light along a line segment.

Freeform Light

Freeform lights allow for custom shapes defined by multiple control points. Effectively a chain of line lights stitched together and treated as a single object (i.e., all lines share the same properties, getting culled or not culled together, etc.).

Examples

In all the images below, the top shape is a normal double-sided orange light, the right shape is a normal double-sided occluder, the bottom shape is a single-sided blueish light, and the left shape is a single-sided occluder.

Circle lights	Line lights
Freeform lights

Analytical Lights Editing Tools

Line And Circle Lights

Line and Circle lights provide handles for intuitive visual alignment of the lights:

Drag the handle to change the circle light radius
Drag the handles to position the line light

You can also manually edit the Radius/Length properties for precise control.

Freeform Lights

To edit the freeform light, enter the edit mode in the editor window. The edit mode enables the following tools:

• Scene handles: Interactive handles and buttons in the scene view allowing to visually inspect and modify the shape
• Editable control points: Ability to manually modify the shape control points coordinates (in the local object space)
• Helper editor tools:

Editor tools
Scene tools

Scene tools:

• Use white handles to drag the existing control points
• Use the red button to remove the nearby control point
• Use the green button to place a new control point in the middle of the segment

Sprite Light

Sprite lights use a sprite texture to define the light shape and properties. Unlike other light contributors, sprite lights do not work outside the camera view.

Note that the sprite's natural color is multiplied by the light contributor color and intensity.

Light Configuration Tips

1. Avoid tiny lights, as they are more prone to producing various visual artifacts.
2. Don't neglect the culling options for the analytical lights, especially in bigger scenes with lots of light contributors.
3. When possible, prefer analytical lights (Circle, Line, Freeform) over Sprite lights. As they are generally more versatile and provide more flexibility.
4. In performance-critical scenarios, consider sticking to a single kind of lights in a scene. Both sprite-lights-only and analytical-lights-only setups will perform better than a mix of both kinds in a single scene.

Built-in Shaders and Materials Guide

The 2D Radiance Cascades system includes several built-in shaders designed to work with the lighting system.

Standard Lit Sprites

RC-Sprite-Lit-Flat

This shader provides basic lighting for flat sprites without normal mapping.

Use Case: Ideal for simple 2D sprites that need to receive lighting but don't require advanced effects

RC-Sprite-Lit-WithNormal

This shader supports normal mapping for more detailed lighting effects on sprites.

Use Case: Best for detailed sprites where you want to simulate surface relief and more realistic lighting

Follow the default Unity "Secondary Textures" approach to attach a normal map to your sprite.

The Distance parameter controls how high above the surface the virtual lights from the lightmap are, when computing the lighting. Higher values lead to softer, more uniform lighting, lower values lead to more dramatic lighting with more emphasis on the direction the light is coming from.

Examples

RC-Sprite-Lit-Flat	RC-Sprite-Lit-Flat
RC-Sprite-Lit-WithNormal, Distance 20	RC-Sprite-Lit-WithNormal, Distance 20
RC-Sprite-Lit-WithNormal, Distance 2	RC-Sprite-Lit-WithNormal, Distance 2
RC-Sprite-Lit-WithNormal, Distance 0.5	RC-Sprite-Lit-WithNormal, Distance 0.5
RC-Sprite-Lit-WithNormal, Distance 0	RC-Sprite-Lit-WithNormal, Distance 0

See Also

• Quality Settings
• General Concepts
• API Reference

Custom Material Integration

It is possible to integrate 2D Radiance Cascades lighting system with your custom materials and shaders. Both ShaderGraph and HLSL integrations are available.

Shader Graph Integration

To use 2D Radiance Cascades lighting in Shader Graph:

1. Open or create a new shader graph.
2. In Unity Editor, go to Packages/2D Radiance Cascades/Shaders/ShaderGraph.
3. See the three pre-configured subgraphs:
   • GetRCLightMapColor - provides the main lightmap color,
   • GetRCDirectionalColor - provides the directional lightmap color for a specified direction
   • GetRCPhongDiffuse - Provides Phong diffuse shading term using the directional lightmaps, and the surface normal
4. Drag and drop the subgraph you need into your shader graph
5. Connect inputs and outputs to your needs

	Pre-configured subgraphs location
	GetRCLightMapColor Inputs: - UV: Lightmap UV location. Most likely you'd want to pass Screen Position here Outputs: - Color: The sampled lightmap color
	GetRCDirectionalColor Inputs: - UV: Lightmap UV location. Most likely you'd want to pass Screen Position here - Direction Index: integer index of the direction to sample the color from. Should be an integer in the range [0; 3] Outputs: - Direction: a vector representing the direction the sampled light is coming from - Color: The sampled lightmap color
	GetRCPhongDiffuse Inputs: - UV: Lightmap UV location. Most likely you'd want to pass Screen Position here - Normal: surface normal - Distance: Distance from the light to the surface Outputs: - Color: Computed diffuse color value

Advanced Manual Integration

For a completely manual integration, you can access the lightmaps directly as global textures and use them however you like.

The Main Lightmap:

1. In the shader graph add a Texture 2D parameter
2. Set it's Scope to Global
3. Set the Reference to _RCLightmap

The Directional Lightmaps:

1. In the shader graph add a Texture 2D Array parameter
2. Set it's Scope to Global
3. Set the Reference to _RCLightmapDirectional
4. Directional lightmaps are stored in four slices of the Texture 2D Array.

HLSL Shader Integration

To access the lightmaps in a custom HLSL shader:

// Include the required headers
#include "Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal/ShaderLibrary/Core.hlsl"
#include "Packages/com.dim0v.radiance-cascades-2d/Shaders/Common.hlsl"

struct appdata
{
    float3 pos : POSITION;
    float2 uv : TEXCOORD0;
};

struct v2f
{
    float4 pos : SV_POSITION;
    float2 uv : TEXCOORD0;
};

// Vertex shader
v2f vert(appdata i) {
    v2f o;
    
    o.uv = i.uv;
    o.pos = GetNormalizedScreenSpaceUV(i.pos);
    
    return o;
}

// Fragment shader
float4 frag(v2f i) : SV_Target
{
    // ...

    // Sample main lightmap
    float3 main_light = GetRCLightmapColor(i.pos);
    
    // Sample directional lightmaps
    float3 directional_lights[RC_DIRECTION_COUNT];
    for (int i = 0; i < RC_DIRECTION_COUNT; ++i) {
      float2 dir;
      directional_lights[i] = GetRCDirectionalColor(i.pos, i, dir);
    }
    
    // Compute Phong diffuse term
    float3 lighting = GetRCPhongDiffuse(i.pos, my_normal, my_distance);

    // ...
}

Key points:

• Include Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal/ShaderLibrary/Core.hlsl for convenience.
• There are tree functions for accessing the lightmap data:
  • GetRCLightmapColor - Accessing the main lightmap
  • GetRCDirectionalColor - Accessing the directional lightmaps
  • GetRCPhongDiffuse - Computing the Phong Diffuse shading using the directional lightmaps
• You need to sample using screen-space coordinates (normalized)
• The lightmap contains RGB values representing the accumulated lighting
• RC_DIRECTION_COUNT contains the number of directional lightmaps available
• GetRCDirectionalColor has an out parameter for the direction the light is coming from for convenience
• For shortcut functions used in the example to exist, you need to include (directly or indirectly) Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.core/ShaderLibrary/Common.hlsl before the Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal/ShaderLibrary/Core.hlsl. Otherwise, use more verbose explicitly typed alternatives (e.g., GetRCLightmapColor_float or GetRCLightmapColor_half instead of GetRCLightmapColor)

Advanced Manual Integration

For a completely manual integration, you can access the lightmaps directly as global textures and use them however you like. You can either still include the Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal/ShaderLibrary/Core.hlsl, or manually declare the following 2 globals:

1. Texture2D<half4> _RCLightmap - the main lightmap.
2. Texture2DArray<half4> _RCLightmapDirectional - directional lightmaps. Individual lightmaps for different directions are stored in four slices of the Texture2DArray.

Quality Settings

Overview

The 2D Radiance Cascades system provides extensive quality settings to balance visual fidelity and performance. These settings can be configured through the RadianceCascadesRendererFeature inspector in your URP Renderer Asset.

Core Settings

Lightmap Scale Factor

Controls the resolution of the light map relative to the camera resolution:

• Range: 0 – 1 (where 1 is full camera resolution, 0 is a 1×1 texture)
• Default: 0.5
• Impact: The most impactful setting for both quality and performance.

Examples

All screenshots feature the same scene rendered at 512x512 resolution.

Lightmap resolution 512 (1/1)	Lightmap resolution 256 (1/2)
Lightmap resolution 128 (1/4)	Lightmap resolution 64 (1/8)
Lightmap resolution 32 (1/16)	Lightmap resolution 8 (1/64)

Radiance Cascade Variants

The system supports three implementation variants, each with different characteristics:

Vanilla

• The original implementation of radiance cascades
• Can be the fastest option in some scenarios
• Very prone to ringing artifacts

BilinearFix

• Modified version that addresses artifacts in the vanilla implementation
• Merges cascades more precisely by casting 4× more rays
• Better quality than Vanilla at a substantial performance cost

HolographicRC

• Uses alternative probe placement that perfectly tiles the screen with light probes (no overlapping and no gaps)
• Enables the use of ray extensions acceleration structure that makes the performance cost almost independent of the scene complexity
• Preserves sharp gradients much better than the other two variants
• Default: Recommended for most scenarios

Examples

Vanilla	Bilinear fix
Holographic RC

Processing Options

Process Analytical Lights on GPU

• Type: Boolean
• Default: Disabled
• Description: Determines whether analytical light sources are processed on the GPU or the CPU
• Impact: Enabling can improve performance by offloading light processing to the GPU. Effectiveness depends on scene complexity and resolution. Has no effect on the visuals.

Ray Marching Settings

Ray marching is used for sprite lights handling.

Ray Marching Tolerance

• Range: 0-10 pixels
• Default: 1
• Description: Defines the tolerance level, as well as the minimum step size for ray marching when handling sprite lights
• Impact: Lower values increase precision at the cost of performance. Higher values blur the sprite lights features.

Examples

Tolerance 0	Tolerance 1
Tolerance 10

Max Ray Marching Steps

• Range: 1-100 steps
• Default: 30
• Description: Maximum number of iterations for ray marching
• Impact: Higher limit makes the ray marching more likely to converge. If the ray runs out of iterations before achieving the required tolerance, it is going to sample the color of the closest sprite light color. It helps to mask some of the divergence artifacts. But in scenes with high contrast sprite light colors it may still lead to glowy artifacts.

Examples

100 steps	20 steps
10 steps	5 steps
1 step

Ray Marching Settings co-relation

Note that these two settings are highly co-related, and they often need to be tweaked together to achieve the best quality and performance balance. For example, when lowering the step limit, it may be a good idea to raise the tolerance level to compensate for the low number of steps taken with larger steps.

In this example the step limit is set to 2 for different tolerance levels:

Tolerance 0	Tolerance 1
Tolerance 2	Tolerance 8

Holographic RC Specific Settings

The following settings only affect the HolographicRC variant and have no effect when using other variants.

Ray Extensions Acceleration Structure

Ray extensions acceleration structure significantly improves performance, especially in complex scenes. Note, however, that it requires a lot of VRAM for higher resolutions. In the ballpark of 2 GB of peak VRAM usage for a 3840p lightmap, scaling roughly quadratically with the resolution (or linearly with the number of pixels). That is, a FullHD lightmap would need approximately 0.5 GB, and an 8K lightmap would need ~8 GB. Nevertheless, in most cases you are likely to get better quality/performance balance by keeping ray extensions enabled and balancing its drawbacks by other means (mostly the lightmap resolution)

Use Ray Extensions

• Type: Boolean
• Default: Enabled
• Description: Determines whether ray-extensions acceleration structure is used.

True Trace Threshold

• Range: 1-16 cascades
• Default: 3
• Description: When Ray Extensions is enabled, determines how many cascades will truly trace rays to determine the direct light contributors' influence. Higher cascades will extrapolate the data from lower cascades.
• Impact: Lower values greatly improve performance and make it much less dependent on the scene complexity. Extremely low values may lead to some artifacts (see below). Note that even high values that would not extrapolate any data may still lead to better performance because the workload gets grouped in a more GPU-friendly way enabling better GPU utilization.

Examples

True Trace Threshold 1	True Trace Threshold 2
True Trace Threshold 3	True Trace Threshold 5
True Trace Threshold 7	True Trace Threshold 9

Notice the diminishing returns. While at threshold 1 there are very noticeable laser-beam-like artifacts, past threshold 5 there is barely any difference at all. The recommended setting of 3 should provide good quality for most cases, unless you need to accurately capture very shallow light rays (e.g., a pinhole scene with a hole very close to light sources).

Border Light Capture Settings

The Radiance Cascades is a screen-space effect. Meaning that on its own it's unable to capture the light information from the outside of the camera frustum. To work around this limitation, there is a separate cone tracing pass that collects the information about the incoming light along the screen borders from different directions so it could be used in the main Radiance Cascades pass. The two settings below provide control over the precision of this pass.

The full scene, used in the examples below (showing the out-of-screen light sources):

Also note that some of the artifacts caused by the insufficient border light capture quality are less noticeable in the static shots but very apparent in motion.

Border Light Linear Scale

• Range: 0-1
• Default: 0.5
• Description: Determines the scaling factor for border light textures (1 is full lightmap resolution, 0 is a single point along every edge)

Examples

Linear Scale 100%	Linear Scale 25%
Linear Scale 6.25%	Linear Scale 0.78%

Border Light Angular Resolution Offset

• Range: 0-16
• Default: 0
• Description: Offset applied to angular resolution of border light textures (0 collects data from all directions required by the HRC pass, 1 is half the directions, 2 from quarter the direction, etc.)

Examples

Offset 0	Offset 2
Offset 5	Offset 7

Lightmap Filter

Controls the filtering method applied to the lightmap:

Bilinear

• Uses basic hardware-driven bilinear sampling without additional filtering
• The least expensive option in terms of performance
• May result in blocky/pixelated appearance when using reduced lightmap resolution
• Not recommended for Holographic RC as it preserves checkerboard artifacts that are inherent to the method

Kawase Upsample

• Default: Recommended for most scenarios
• Applies a modified Kawase Upsample kernel to the lightmap:

• Effectively reduces pixelation from lightmap upscaling
• Addresses checkerboard artifacts in Holographic RC mode

Cross

• Applies a cross-blur kernel to the lightmap:

• Less aggressive blur compared to Kawase Upsample
• Mitigates checkerboard artifacts in Holographic RC with less blurring

Examples

All examples are applied to HRC variant

Bilinear	Bilinear closeup
Modified Kawase	Modified Kawase closeup
Cross	Cross closeup

See Also

• Usage Guide for practical usage examples

Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D assembly

Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D namespace

Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights namespace

Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Utility namespace

RadianceCascadesRendererFeature class

Renderer feature for the 2D Radiance Cascades lighting system. Add this feature to your Universal Renderer Data asset to enable the lighting system.

public class RadianceCascadesRendererFeature : ScriptableRendererFeature

Public Members

See Also

• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D

RadianceCascadesRendererFeature.Create method

public override void Create()

See Also

• class RadianceCascadesRendererFeature
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D

RadianceCascadesRendererFeature.OnCameraPreCull method

public override void OnCameraPreCull(ScriptableRenderer renderer, ref CameraData cameraData)

See Also

• class RadianceCascadesRendererFeature
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D

RadianceCascadesRendererFeature.AddRenderPasses method

public override void AddRenderPasses(ScriptableRenderer renderer, ref RenderingData renderingData)

See Also

• class RadianceCascadesRendererFeature
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D

QualitySettings structure

A structure representing various quality settings for the Radiance Cascades lighting system.

public struct QualitySettings

Public Members

See Also

• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Utility

QualitySettings.TrueTraceThreshold field

When UseRayExtensions is true, determines how many cascades will truly trace rays to determine the light fluence as opposed to extrapolating data from lower cascades.

public int TrueTraceThreshold;

Remarks

Only affects the HolographicRC variant. Has no effect for other variants.

See Also

• struct QualitySettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Utility

QualitySettings.LightmapScaleFactor field

Represents the resolution scale factor for the radiance cascades. 1 is the full camera resolution. 0 is a 1x1 texture.

public float LightmapScaleFactor;

See Also

• struct QualitySettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Utility

QualitySettings.ProcessAnalyticalLightsOnGPU field

Determines whether analytical light sources will be processed on the GPU or the CPU. Enabling this option can improve performance by offloading light processing to the GPU instead of the CPU, but its effectiveness may depend on the complexity of the scene and the resolution.

public bool ProcessAnalyticalLightsOnGPU;

Remarks

Has no effect if there are no active analytical lights in the scene

See Also

• struct QualitySettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Utility

QualitySettings.RayMarchingTolerance field

Defines the tolerance level for the ray marching process when handling sprite lights. Measured in pixels. A lower value increases precision but may incur additional computational cost.

public float RayMarchingTolerance;

Remarks

Has no effect if there are no active sprite lights on the screen

See Also

• struct QualitySettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Utility

QualitySettings.LightmapFilter field

Specifies the filtering method to be applied when processing the lightmap.

public LightmapFilter LightmapFilter;

See Also

• enum LightmapFilter
• struct QualitySettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Utility

QualitySettings.Variant field

Determines which variant of the radiance cascades will be used

public RCVariant Variant;

See Also

• enum RCVariant
• struct QualitySettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Utility

QualitySettings.MaxRayMarchingSteps field

Defines the maximum number of steps for a ray marching used in handling sprite lights.

public int MaxRayMarchingSteps;

Remarks

Has no effect if there are no active sprite lights on the screen

See Also

• struct QualitySettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Utility

QualitySettings.BorderLightLinearScale field

Determines the scaling factor for the border light textures in HRC. 1 is full lightmap side resolution, 0 is a single point

public float BorderLightLinearScale;

Remarks

Only affects the HolographicRC variant. Has no effect for other variants.

See Also

• struct QualitySettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Utility

QualitySettings.UseRayExtensions field

Determines whether ray-extensions acceleration structure is used for holographic RC.

public bool UseRayExtensions;

Remarks

Only affects the HolographicRC variant. Has no effect for other variants.

See Also

• struct QualitySettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Utility

QualitySettings.BorderLightAngularResolutionOffset field

Defines an offset applied to the angular resolution of the border light textures. 0 offset means collecting data from all directions required by the HRC, 1 is 1/2 of the directions required, 2 is 1/4, and so on.

public int BorderLightAngularResolutionOffset;

Remarks

Only affects the HolographicRC variant. Has no effect for other variants.

See Also

• struct QualitySettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Utility

RadianceCascadesRendererFeature.Instance property

Global access point to the active RadianceCascadesRendererFeature instance.

public static RadianceCascadesRendererFeature Instance { get; }

See Also

• class RadianceCascadesRendererFeature
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D

LightmapFilter enumeration

Lightmaps filtering method

public enum LightmapFilter

Values

See Also

• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Utility

RCVariant enumeration

Represents the radiance cascades implementation variant

public enum RCVariant

Values

See Also

• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Utility

LightContributor class

Component that defines a light contributor in the 2D Radiance Cascades lighting system. It represents both lights and occluders/shadow casters.

public class LightContributor : MonoBehaviour

Public Members

See Also

• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights

LightContributor.Intensity property

The brightness multiplier for this light source.

public float Intensity { get; set; }

See Also

• class LightContributor
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights

LightContributor.SetDirty method

Marks this light contributor as dirty, indicating that its state has been changed. Make sure to call this after modifying AnalyticalLightSettings or SpriteLightSettings from the code directly.

public void SetDirty()

See Also

• class LightContributor
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights

LightContributor.Color property

The color of the light emitted by this contributor.

public Color Color { get; set; }

See Also

• class LightContributor
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights

LightContributor.LightType property

The type of light source this contributor represents.

public LightType LightType { get; set; }

See Also

• enum LightType
• class LightContributor
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights

AnalyticalLightSettings structure

Configuration settings for analytical lights (Circle and Line types).

public struct AnalyticalLightSettings

Public Members

See Also

• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights

AnalyticalLightSettings.Cullable field

When true, the light can be culled when outside the view frustum.

public bool Cullable;

See Also

• struct AnalyticalLightSettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights

AnalyticalLightSettings.CullDistance field

Maximum distance at which the light affects the scene if Cullable is true.

public float CullDistance;

See Also

• struct AnalyticalLightSettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights

AnalyticalLightSettings.Size field

The size of the light source in world units.

public float Size;

See Also

• struct AnalyticalLightSettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights

AnalyticalLightSettings.SingleSided field

When true, the light only emits from one side.

public bool SingleSided;

See Also

• struct AnalyticalLightSettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights

AnalyticalLightSettings.FreeformPoints field

Array of points defining the custom shape for freeform lights.

public Vector2[] FreeformPoints;

See Also

• struct AnalyticalLightSettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights

SpriteLightSettings structure

Configuration settings for sprite-based lights.

public struct SpriteLightSettings

Public Members

See Also

• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights

SpriteLightSettings.LightSourceSprite field

The sprite used as the light source.

public Sprite LightSourceSprite;

See Also

• struct SpriteLightSettings
• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights

LightType enumeration

Types of light contributors available in the 2D Radiance Cascades system.

public enum LightType

Values

See Also

• namespace Dim0v.RadianceCascades2D.Lights