Cascaded Shadow Maps Transition too close to camera

Development Rendering
1

Hello

I’m having problems getting the most detailed cascade to extend further from the camera. No matter what I do I can’t get it to extend longer than around 2 meters from the camera. I’ve been playing with the Cascaded Shadow maps settings, but nothing I do helps. It just makes the cascades look worse and the transition happen even closer.

Here’s two videos I made to show off what I mean:

Here’s the settings for the Directional Light in this Video:

Here’s the settings for the Directional Light in this Video:


And here’s the light settings for both:


I’ve tried bumping up the “Num Dynamic Shadow Cascades”, but that only makes more transitions. I tried playing with the “Distribution Exponent” and "Dynamic Shadow Distance MovableLight but those just makes the shadows look worse no matter if I make the number higher or lower.

I tried playing around with these console commands too:

r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades=10
r.Shadow.FadeResolution=8
r.Shadow.MinResolution=4
r.Shadow.TexelsPerPixel=2

r.LightFunctionQuality=1
r.ShadowQuality=5
r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades=4
r.Shadow.MaxResolution=4096
r.Shadow.RadiusThreshold=0.01
r.Shadow.DistanceScale=1.0
r.Shadow.CSM.TransitionScale=1.0
r.DistanceFieldShadowing=1
r.DistanceFieldAO=1

When I bumped r.Shadow.DistanceScale up to 2 it slightly increased the range by about 1 meter and worsened the shadows a bit, but setting it higher to 3 did nothing.

Doesn anyone have any tips for increasing the distance? I want the most detailed cascade to extend about 10 meters in front of me before transitioning to the next one.

Any help would be much appreciated.

-Headstub

2

I think I managed to fix it on my own. I’ll leave the thread up in case anyone has the same problem as me. Here’s what I did:

3

You now have 400meters worth of dynamic shadows. This is quite heavy for performance. I use 50meters and 4 cascades. Can’t remember Distribution exponent thought. But it’s important that you have non zero value for Cascade Transition Fraction or transition will be super obvious.

4

I’ve tried that, and I still have to be basically right next to the feet of the character with my camera to see the most detailed shadow. Any further away than that and the shadow transitions to the next cascade. Is there no way to manually control the transition distance of each cascade?