Rendering Real Time Shadows to a Certain Distance

Since realtime shadows are such framerate hogs, i wanted a way to only render them when they are a certain distance away from the camera, and only render baked shadows from that point on. Please excuse my noobishness in this kind of thing, I have no idea whether or not this requires lightapping or not, whatever that is.

Lightmapping is necessary, as those are the baked shadows you’re talking about. Lightmapping is a way of speeding up lighting calculations (usually for stationary objects) by pre-rendering the lighting, and at run-time, simply fetching it from a texture (a wise man once said: “Never put off to run-time what you can do at compile-time”, meaning you should never make the computer do more work than it needs to in running a program). What you’re looking for is the shadow distance. You can set this in the Quality settings under Edit>Project Settings>Quality.