Hello friends,
I’ve made a grassland and it looked perfect until I switched to dynamic lighting. Now I’m getting a tiled shadow artifact on the grass that is farthest away (screenshot attached) and can’t figure out for the life of me what it is. Any ideas or possible workarounds?
I’m using dynamic lighting only and distance field shadows
Do the artifacts align with the foliage actors placed for the grass? If so, it could be the mesh distance field representation generated a sort of staggered grid mesh(es), thus not covering the grass completely and the shadows don’t fill in entirely. The mesh for the distance field can be replaced with a mesh that is either created or was generated for a different actor / object in the scene.
If it’s not that, which it is likely it’s not, go to the mesh editor for the landscape and increase distance field shadow resolution, and/or increase the lightmap resolution one step or two. Even though it’s dynamic lighting, lighting data from lightmaps is still used in the Volumetric Lightmap, which spreads sample spheres in higher density near all surfaces and accrues the lighting data from lightmaps, then interpolates them to the surronding geometry. So, increasing lightmap resolution could still have an effect. There’s also tweaking the VLM settings: decrease Detail Cell Size for more samples (a denser grid of sample spheres) and increase Maximum Memory Data to allocate more memory for the samples so they don’t get culled and result in a loss of lighting / shadowing data / detail.
The only other one I can think of is CSM. If it’s turned on, it probably doesn’t have the correct settings for the scene. But if it’s off / disabled, then it’s not necessary to change.
Thanks a million for your help! I ended up just going into LOD’s and making the distant grass cast no shadow at all which was a quick workaround. I may revisit this and your advice in the future when I wanna dive deeper
-N
