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.
This feature is an alternative to the Contact Shadows Volume override, so the initial setup is similar. To set up ray-traced contact shadows:
- First follow the Enabling Contact Shadows and Using Contact Shadows steps to set up the Contact Shadows override.
- In the Frame Settings for your Cameras, enable Ray Tracing.
- HDRP calculates ray-traced contact shadows on a per-light basis. This means you need to enable it for each light.
- Select a Light and, in the Inspector, go to Shadows > Contact Shadows and tick the Enable checkbox. This exposes the Ray Tracing property.
- Enable the Ray Tracing checkbox.

Did you find this page useful? Please give it a rating:
Thanks for rating this page!
What kind of problem would you like to report?
Thanks for letting us know! This page has been marked for review based on your feedback.
If you have time, you can provide more information to help us fix the problem faster.
Provide more information
You've told us this page needs code samples. If you'd like to help us further, you could provide a code sample, or tell us about what kind of code sample you'd like to see:
You've told us there are code samples on this page which don't work. If you know how to fix it, or have something better we could use instead, please let us know:
You've told us there is information missing from this page. Please tell us more about what's missing:
You've told us there is incorrect information on this page. If you know what we should change to make it correct, please tell us:
You've told us this page has unclear or confusing information. Please tell us more about what you found unclear or confusing, or let us know how we could make it clearer:
You've told us there is a spelling or grammar error on this page. Please tell us what's wrong:
You've told us this page has a problem. Please tell us more about what's wrong:
Thank you for helping to make the Unity documentation better!
Your feedback has been submitted as a ticket for our documentation team to review.
We are not able to reply to every ticket submitted.