This was never responded to and closed, but has been causing me problems for months. There is currently no way to disable shadows on scenegraph meshes either via the mesh asset or the material which is a problem when scenegraph entities are already so excessively costly in performance
Please select what you are reporting on:
Unreal Editor for Fortnite
What Type of Bug are you experiencing?
Verse
Steps to Reproduce
Try to spawn a mesh via scenegraph that is visible, it will be casting a a shadow which can be ugly and costs performance
Expected Result
There is no shadow when âCast Shadowsâ in the mesh is disabled for the material slot
Can you share your setup in the material to disable the shadows? I tested here and is working fine, idk if you are doing something different from meâŚ
The main thing is the inconsistency between systems ie bpp and static mesh and mesh_comp. We shouldnât need to change materials just to disable shadows on a mesh in sg its like taking 2 steps back from having a system that worked perfect to a new work around.
Still canât access static switch params via verse, so Iâll have to make a ton of MIs for this and this still doesnât remove the mesh from the shadow depth render Might as well keep the shadows as my concern is CPU performance rn
Static Switch Params are static because they only exist before compiling the shaders. (Same with anything that has âStaticâ in the name such as static bools)
Shaders are pure math on the gpu, only numbers (specifically, only floats), no bools, and not even integers exist without doing workarounds⌠(Plus considering different shader platforms and instruction libraries)
The Static Switch node is just a utility for UE to make more easy making multiple variants and toggling states/features of that material on different instances (all at compile time, none are possible at runtime).
For runtime, you use things such as 0.0 to 1.0 param, instead of static switch / static bools. This is normal and not a workaround, is just how GPUs work to compute the shader⌠Even epic does that on their own materials for example, common in all gamedev scenarios :ÂP (Any language that says it is a bool, is just a disguised 0-1 float. And you can do that in verse if you want)
About the shadow options (together with collision and other options on the LOD settings), it seems weird, it was supposed to work, idk why is not working.
But to be honest, considering all the engine tech, I would remove these settigns from that place and more to other places, maybe thatâs why they did not considered that when migrating meshes to Scene Graph yetâŚ
For example, the collision is server sided, only one lod can have its âmandatoryâ collision to be shared across all players, regardless if each player is seeing a different LOD type due to graphics settings for example. (Thatâs why the option is grayed out - It would usually be also modified on the âLOD for collisionâ setting on the other cattegoryâŚ)
Might as well keep the shadows as my concern is CPU performance rn