Unity affords us great control over shadows in our game scenes. We can control which objects cast shadows, which objects can receive shadows, and various properties of the shadows. Shadows in Unity closely replicate the way shadows exist in the real world. As discussed earlier in this chapter, there are soft shadows and hard shadows.
Soft shadows result in greater realism, but at the cost of additional computations and processing. Hard shadows provide less realistic, but often acceptable, shadows during a game and are less processor intensive. Hard shadows are easy to identify in a game because the shadows cast will have sharp, blocky shadow edges.
