I was teaching my students how to build lighting in Unreal when… I just discovered I was not able to make penumbra shadows work, when setting a high source angle or source radius to lights.
Doing a deeper test, I have noticed that “area shadows” are absolutely horrible in Unreal 5. Apparently since 5.0, but working (MUCH more) fine in UE4.
What the hell is happening? Maybe I missed something? Why nobody noticed this before?
Interesting. The lightmap resolutions are identical between the two engine versions?
I can see a few undesirable lighting issues in the UE4 version in the crevices between the floor and the cube, but I certainly agree that the shadowing in UE5 looks hideous in comparison.
If I manage to find some time I’ll try to do a little bit of testing myself.
How big are the cubes? It’s hard to get the scale of this scene.
Try giving the spotlight a smaller source radius, like 5. 100 seems a bit excessive. We are talking about the source radius and not the attenuation radius?
Stationary lights may use dynamic shadows for close up views. Not sure if that could be a problem with your setup.
Also what’s your overall settings? Ray tracing lighting or Lumen? Lumen doesn’t use baked lighting afaik. Lumen with dynamic lights could probably be the better choice for this demo.
Unfortunately baked lighting in 5.x is a broken mess. I’ve posted here and sent detailed bug reports on officinal channels but it seems to fall on deaf ears…
I didn’t use baked lighting in any project I made with Unreal 5. It’s somewhat legacy. Try Lumen. It needs a bit of time to figure out the best settings but YouTube can be your friend here. William Faucher’s videos are very helpful.
I don’t want to imply you’re a beginner, here is one of his videos:
Thank you for your replies. All maps are exactly identical, just duplicates. Cubes and Floors are of it’s native dimensions; scale 1,1,1.
And thankt you but Lumen is not a solution, but a very ‘random’ alternative, as it’s a completely different technology, for a very different hardware target, and for a very different kind of customer. (Even if I already have some unique presets for it, giving better quality and better performance too, but I consider it’s still not suitable for final shipping for my customers).
What trash? Some of us conduct useful tests and report errors. Others just criticize through unintelligible poorly written messages.
That’s a good result, even if it’s still much worse than the UE4 CPU results.
Anyway, I don’t understand why it’s working better for you, as I even verified my 5.3.2 installation yesterday, so it’s fresh. My CPU is a Ryzen 9 3950x.
you run tests all day long just to smear the coders? i can read that between your lines of text. is that fun? you got nothing better to do?
either way… i’m pretty sure you had a setting wrong before you baked and took the screenshot. not thorough enough. i mean… it obviously doesn’t reproduce. and it’s a default install. same code.
I have tons of work to do. That’s why I notice errors and bugs, isolate them in shareable projects, and report them, as UE5 has many bugs, even if you are happy with them or your project is so simple that you don’t notice them, nor need them fixed. But some of us are a little more exigent, trying to get the very best out of Unreal, because we need it for our stunning-quality products.
Obviously, when I reprt and share a project, I have made many tests and I share it in the exact same situation I did my last test so, if I re-decompress it, open it, and make a rebuild, I get the same issue.
I will try reinstalling 5.3.2 anyway, or will wait for another user to confirm the result.
PS: but again, the issue is still there in your screenshot too, even if much more acceptable.
EDITED: I have totally deleted the 5.3.2 install and reinstalled it from scratch. Same exact error again. Are you sure you used the same ‘scenario’, as same level, same Unreal version, same lightmass (CPU)…? Because I would be quite surprised about my CPU baking it differently than yours. Any other user testing the scene would be very appreciated. Thank you.
I was able to get the exact same result as you by opening the project and baking lighting with CPULM,
However, that is with the lighting quality set to preview, which it is by default. If I change the lighting quality to production, it is pretty much identical to @glitchered’s result.
OMG, I was totally wrong. I don’t know why I didn’t check the quality as usual… maybe because of doing some many tests (one with every Unreal version since 4.26), and because it remained as Production when I duplicated from 4.26 to 4.27, so I didn’t check it again.
In summary, it’s working fine, as intended
I didn’t reported it as a bug, that’s why I was asking before reporting, as usual.
Thank you for your confirmation and mentioning it was looking like in Preview @Ozykz !
maybe because of doing some many tests (one with every Unreal version since 4.26), and because it remained as Production when I duplicated from 4.26 to 4.27, so I didn’t check it again.