I’ve been having some issues with the max distance of the global distance field lately and it’s been causing headaches for material making (working on a shoreline effect). I think it might be causing some other shadowing issues as well and the annoying sharp banding line with skyatmosphere.
Basically, if lumen GI is used, it hardcaps the max DF view distance and it’s a really short distance (200m I think). This causes a lot of really ugly issues with materials and effects that rely on distance fields.
Here’s a clip of it in action:
Here’s the banding with sky atmosphere:
Here’s the default open world template but this might just be some kind of single sided DF issue combined with the low sun angle:
Regarding far traces, the default is indeed 200m but the documentation here gives some options for dealing with it.
As for the last picture, it has nothing to do with lumen or distance fields. The terrain mesh just needs to be set to cast two sided shadows. This does not require the material or distance field to be two sided.
I get that, in terms of the actual lumen traces, but it shouldn’t be breaking the entire distance field. If I have the distance field max distance set to like 1km, Lumen should still cap to 200m default, but the rest of the things that use distance fields should NOT be getting broken. I did test out the lumen scene view distance setting and it gives me control over the the range again, which is nice, but obviously comes at a price. But again, it should not be overriding the entire system like that.
Also, the entire distance field system gets broken with lumen GI. Even when you’re in range, it looks like something out of an 8bit game when you use distancetonearestsurface materials:
Which is leading to issues like this(debug material while working on shoreline stuff using a single layer water material and lerping between absorption coefficents based on the distance to nearest surface):
EDIT: I did read in the lumen details page that it doesn’t support single layer water, so I made a new material and changed the shading model and this is still what I get: