4.13 Released!

General Announcements
63

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if you visualise the cascade frustums, they all are nested inside eachother and just move depending on the viewing direction - that’s pretty bad yo.
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regardless of the viewing angle the cascades never leave eachother’s bounds, the largest bound contains all of the smaller ones completely
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That’s not the case, larger cascades are not placed to contain smaller cascades. However, with a large camera FOV which is typical, the texture mapped to the larger cascade can end up encompassing the smaller cascade. Object culling on the CPU is still using the non-overlapping bounds of the cascade. Objects only have to be drawn into multiple cascades if they are actually affected by multiple cascade depth ranges. Have a look at GetShadowSplitBounds().

The image you posted looks like clipmaps which aren’t view direction dependent at all, unlike cascades, so it’s completely unrelated.

64

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s there a reason why you can’t do so for sky and directional lights? Also the lights require to be set to dynamic in order for cached shadowmaps to work. Might it not be an idea to have all lights set to static and only have specified objects cast cached dynamic shadows instead?
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Directional light shadowmaps (CSM) are view dependent and require a complex scrolling approach to properly cache them. Plus directional light shadows are often combined with WPO animated foliage which can’t be cached, so it’s lower in priority.

Skylights don’t use shadowmaps.

65

[=DanielW;588843]
Directional light shadowmaps (CSM) are view dependent and require a complex scrolling approach to properly cache them. Plus directional light shadows are often combined with WPO animated foliage which can’t be cached, so it’s lower in priority.
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What about just making it so that the WPO animated foliage would be cached too, so the shadow would just not 100% fit the foliage to save performance? That’s what I would prefer. I want to save as much performance as possible and shadows are really expensive, especially in VR, so cached directional lights would be very nice to have. The best other alternative is often to just disable shadows completely, and thats definitely more ugly than a shadow that might not 100% fit WPO animated stuff. :slight_smile:

66

Hello,

I tried importing an Alembic file but it resulted in a crash. I have posted the details on AnswerHub:

Any ideas how to resolve this? What format are you expecting the Alembic file to be written as? What I mean is how is your loader expecting the vertices, points and uvs named in the alembic file? Is there any structure it expects?

Thanks!

67

new Preview Scene Settings panel

Hello,

where and how I can get new “Preview Scene Settings panel” to work with?

thanks
regards

68

Anyone else feel like this is abit in the future ?

69

[=kestrelm;588904]
Hello,

I tried importing an Alembic file but it resulted in a crash. I have posted the details on AnswerHub:

Any ideas how to resolve this? What format are you expecting the Alembic file to be written as? What I mean is how is your loader expecting the vertices, points and uvs named in the alembic file? Is there any structure it expects?

Thanks!
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I’ve reported and responded to your post with the information you provided and what I found while working with your asset.

70

[=Bimbachi;588916]
Hello,

where and how I can get new “Preview Scene Settings panel” to work with?

thanks
regards
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You should see a tab in the Static Mesh Editor next to the Details Panel that allows you to set all the scene’s settings. If you don’t see it, you can go to Window > Preview Scene Settings to enable it.

71

[=DanielW;588843]
Directional light shadowmaps (CSM) are view dependent and require a complex scrolling approach to properly cache them. Plus directional light shadows are often combined with WPO animated foliage which can’t be cached, so it’s lower in priority.

Skylights don’t use shadowmaps.
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Crytek also noticed the view dependency makes caching harder, so they made cascades aligned to light space, at the price of wasting texels:
Playing with Real-Time Shadows, Page 55, CRYENGINE - Crytek"s powerful game development platform

72

Hi all,

I’ve just released the Plastic SCM plugin 0.8.1 beta release for this new UE 4.13.

Enjoy the shinny 4.13!

73

Well, they certainly seem to be nested, here’s the worst case scenario of wasted shadowmap / distribution, when the light is directly shining down 90 degrees, looking at the horizon and then using the freeze camera command and show frustums along with visualising the whole scene shadowmap, it has a lot of overlap considering it should be spreading them out further.

1920×1080 418 KB

Those cascade distributions are totally correct, 90 fov and they are all nested inside (that is froze from when I looked at the horizon while the dir light is 90 degrees pointing down) and it’s wasting so much shadowmap space by nesting them like that, they should barely overlap just so the transition area is covered.

1920×1080 368 KB

Wasteful, so I hope it’ll be fixed, pretty please :slight_smile:

Changing the maximum distance doesn’t change the distribution either, it just scales the closest cascade up.

1920×1080 381 KB

1920×1080 380 KB

It’s pretty bad when you really dig into it, because it doesn’t work how it should at all… Why at 20K units are cascades being clamped? The distribution exponent doesn’t work how it should, at least, I would think that it should affect the cascade distribution in the range, not relative to distance from the camera like it seems to at the moment. When the distance is below the magic number which is around 5000, where the blue cascade stops growing past that distance, the whole distribution is broken.

Those orthographic boxes shouldn’t be nested like they are right now, Crytek said about wasting texel space to afford cached CSM, but this method right now is wasting the most.

1920×1080 392 KB

was froze with 36 fov, it looks like it’s actually working in that photo how it’s meant to, so basically, someone did something wrong because there’s no reason it shouldn’t spread them further like that at 90 fov, no reason at all really…

74

Not really a bug. Unable to build 4.13 from the source file as AutomationScripts.Automation are missing references to GUBP.Automation, Localization.Automation and OneSkyLocalization.Automation.
The preview builds have these references in the DotNET folder. I’m going to delete the fold and try again - perhaps the download screwed up?

75

In the static mesh editor, the highlight material checkbox does not work on Mac OS X (i.e. the part of the mesh with the corresponding material is not highlighted). Shall I enter a answer hub, or this has been already reported?
Thanks!

76

sketchup fbx import to UE 4.13 not make auto Generate lightmap UVs are Issues or only me?

77

thank you

[= ;588961]
You should see a tab in the Static Mesh Editor next to the Details Panel that allows you to set all the scene’s settings. If you don’t see it, you can go to Window > Preview Scene Settings to enable it.
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thank you …

78

[=rranon;589109]
In the static mesh editor, the highlight material checkbox does not work on Mac OS X (i.e. the part of the mesh with the corresponding material is not highlighted). Shall I enter a answer hub, or this has been already reported?
Thanks!
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It’s also not working for me, windows 10, laptop gpu though - gtx 765m.

79

Please take a look at this issue:ios metal rendering issue in 4.13 - Rendering - Epic Developer Community Forums [MENTION=9] Ellis[/MENTION]
Thanks a lot!

80

Hello. Thank you for the new version.
Why don’t you do compatibility OnlineSubsystemNull with OnlineSubsystemGooglePlay?

81

Procedural Mesh lost his collision in packaged project if manually added into the level, it not happen if you spawn it in the level, i will make a bug report as soon as possible.

82

Good Job guys :slight_smile: :o