Camera surrounded by following circular shadow Bug? 4.22.1

@Pine722 When you say you deleted the Swarm directory I take it you just deleted the cache?

Crazy isn’t it, you have decreasing shadows, and I want to get rid of them ( the followers!! ) ;_)

UPDATE:

Turned out I had a huge object (a skydome) in the scene which meant my entire level was in shadow. The confusing thing was that my dynamic shadows were only set to show in a relatively small distance from the camera, which gave the effect in the image. Setting this object to not render a shadow fixed the issue. I didn’t have this issue in my 4.23 project which is a bit strange.

I had this issue out of nowhere when I tried coloring the skylight, and a shadow followed my camera. I didn’t know what to do when I flicked the DirectionalLight’s “Mobility” options between Movable, Static, or Stationary just to mess around with it. It removed the shadow and the issue was fixed. Maybe it reset the light or something when that option was switched, but shadow gone.

Honestly, I don’t remember as it’s been a while, but it was probably the cache. If that wasn’t it then, I’d install a separate fresh version of the engine and delete the old swarm folder and copy the new swarm folder there. Hopefully you don’t need to do that and the other posts offer more insight as to another solution. I’d like to mention that whenever this bug occurred for me (it happened more than once), it was always completely random and did not happen after I specifically did anything to initiate it. If it was something I did then for some reason it would take a long time for it to appear.

I found what the problem is. It’s in the directional light under Cascaded Shadow Maps. If you lower the value it will decrease the circle under the camera.

Nope, mine is on zero and I still get it, not even turning off shadow amount uinder sun and sky > directional light makes it all go away…it has to be some bug ?
4.25.3 world comp terrain tiles.

I just had exactly the same problem, and it was Contact Shadow Length In World Space Units in my Directional Light that caused this behaviour.

I had the same issue. The sky dome had dynamic shadows turned on.

Delete the directional light and put a new one. If you’re using sky atmosphere. Set these settings in the new directional light.

Intensity = 1.0 lux
Atmosphere Sun Light = Checked
Cast Cloud Shadows = Checked

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It because of skydome.
Un check cast shadow under lighting menu for skydome

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Hi so I am in 4.271 and this issue has popped up . Can anyone help get rid of it?

I´m having this from some time now.

Do like this: select Light Source. Delete it. Press CTRL+Z

done

Greetings @SirjoePanzer !

We’re SO excited to welcome you to the Unreal Engine community! :medal_sports: I see that this is the first post you have made in our forums.

We love it when community members come together, discover solutions, and share them! Thank you so much for being such a vital part of our growing community! Happy Developing and “Make Something Unreal!”

so in my case my grass LODs were causing what I perceived as a shadow. Really what was happening is each successive LOD had a brighter overall color to it, so the circle closest to me was darkest, as though it was a shadow. The solution was to modify my LODs of course

I think this is to do with the ray traced shadow culling method, you can change it by using

r.RayTracing.Culling

with the following different values -

0: Culling disabled
1: Culling by distance and solid angle enabled. Only cull objects behind camera.
2: Culling by distance and solid angle enabled. Cull objects in front and behind camera.
3: Culling by distance OR solid angle enabled. Cull objects in front and behind camera.

and change the radius with

r.RayTracing.Culling.Radius

(find out the current value first with r.RayTracing.Culling.Radius ?) then enter in a new value

Had this issue using UE 5.3.2. In my case, I’m using the cloud mask and object blueprints that are in the volumetric content folder. The cloud mask blueprint assigned a light function to my directional light and after removing it the circular shadow was gone.