This is a part of my game where you are overlooking the ocean from a cliff and the shadows are incredibly jagged. The light source is a directional light (sun) and I have tested the same shadows on a cube mesh and they looked much softer and nice. Making me think the issue is with the water maybe? I am using the ocean body default of the water plugin for Ue5. Any help would be appreciated!
(p.s. The world that is casting shadows isn’t fully developed so that’s why they look disjoined. I’m only interested in the shadows not looking like giant pixels.)
Update: If I put a big mesh in the water or near it, it improves all the shadows in the water. The shadows also look much better on it than on the water.
Usually this happens when you try to bake lights in a giant object.
Is your ocean a giant plane? In any case, I recommend you to use multiple planes for the same reason. The Lighmap is calculated by mesh so, a giant plane causes the lightmap to scale immensely.
Or, to use a Stationary/Movable Light for the shadows, not a Static Light.
For what I have read, It is not that there is a problem with the shadows in the water plugin, but that several users have experienced problems with the jagged shadows in Unreal 5.
The plugin should be ok, but if you still want to know how to be sure if it’s a giant plane, you can change the View Mode of the Viewport from “Lit” to “Brush Wireframe” (Sorry the UE4 screen, in UE5 is the same)
If you see a lot of squares, then it’s subdivided, if you see only two giant triangles then is only a giant plane. In any case since it is a plugin there is no way to know for sure how it’s made. Just reading the documentation
Here I found a community tutorial about jagged shadows in UE5 to see if it works for you:
