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Raytracing Effects

The RT build of DanceXR uses Unity HDRP’s hardware-accelerated raytracing for a set of effects that go beyond what screen-space techniques can produce: indirect bounce light, accurate reflections, true contact shadows, and (experimentally) full pathtracing.

Available on PC RT builds only, with an RT-capable GPU. The HD build can use screen-space approximations of most of these effects; the LW / Android / Quest builds use simpler shaders.

Reflection

Real-time raytraced reflections — the scene reflected in glossy and metallic surfaces is computed by tracing rays into the world rather than sampling a screen capture.

Settings:

  • Sky reflection control (added 2025.4) — how much of the sky environment is mixed into the reflection. Turn this down for indoor scenes; turn it up outdoors.
  • Raytracing fallback to sky (2025.4) — when a reflected ray finds nothing to hit, falls back to the sky color. Disable for indoor scenes so dark interiors don’t get sky-tinted reflections.

Translucent objects also receive realistic shadows in RT builds (2025.1).

Ambient occlusion

Raytraced AO computes contact darkening by tracing short rays from each shaded surface. Compared to screen-space AO, this captures occlusion that is off-screen, behind the camera, or hidden by depth.

Global illumination

Indirect bounce light. A wall lit by sunlight bounces some of that light onto a face nearby; raytraced GI captures that bounce instead of relying on baked light or precomputed probes.

GI was tuned in 2025.4 with GI Indoor and GI Outdoor presets — start from those, then fine-tune.

Shadow

Raytraced shadows produce sharp contact shadows and softer penumbras at distance. Translucent surfaces cast translucent (color-tinted) shadows.

Contact shadow

Short-range contact shadows — the shadows in seams, corners, under buttons — are traced with an accurate technique that screen-space solutions struggle with at edges of the screen.

Pathtracing (experimental, 2025.5+)

Full pathtracing for real-time preview and offline recording (Creator only). Pathtracing simulates the full transport of light — direct, indirect, refractions, glowing emissive objects illuminating the scene.

Pathtraced output is noisy by default. Reduce noise with:

  • Frame accumulation — combine multiple frames; more frames = less noise but the image only stabilizes when the camera is still.
  • Lower max bounce depth — fewer light bounces, less indirect noise, less realism.
  • Disable translucent skin — skin scattering is a major noise source in pathtracing. Turn it off in Skin Materials.
  • Denoiser — pick Open Image Denoise (slower, more accurate) or Optix Denoiser (faster, less detail-preserving).

This feature is experimental and may not perform well in every scene.