Change how Shadowing work or: Soft Shadows are impossible

General Feedback & Requests
1

For days I tried to find a good technique for shadowing and Lighting my levels and I couldn’t find any solution that looks good.
I encountered multiple issues with both Distance Field Shaodws and Cascaded Shadow Maps:

  • Cascaded Shadow Maps (CSMs) turn every shadowing into dynamic within the Dynamic Shadow Range

    • Baked Soft Shadows (Area Shadows) are only soft when they are out of the Range

      • Baked Shadows should stay baked, even in the CSMs

      • Only dynamic Objects should be put into the CSMs (isn’t that the actual purpose of them anyway?)

  • Distance Field Shadows are rendered behind the CSMs, which doesn’t really make sense to me

    • DFSs have the advantage that they are also soft/have the ability to appear soft. Having Soft Shadows is more important when I am near the shadow, not when I am far away(= behind the CSMs) from it

https://i.imgur.com/aDUVQ5t.png

Soft Shadows can really improve the appearance of the scene, but I only manage to make them without CSMs and without DFSs (or they only appear far away, where they absolutely don’t matter anymore)

My suggestion:
Allow the developer to change the order of Shadowing.

Distance Field Shadows before (near the Camera) Cascaded Shadow Maps

Baked Shadows should not disappear when I am in the CSMs either, it destroys the purpose of Precomputed Shadows.

2

I’m curious, is your light Static or Stationary?

3

Stationary, otherwhise I wouldn’t have dynamic shadows

4

a Static Light will still give you dynamic shadows on movable objects, which I think is what you’re looking for

5

Static lights don’t affect dynamic objects at all except for the light probes.

6

Not really.

I want to have Baked Shadows (Soft shadows) together with CSMs or DFFs. But I can either have dynamic Shadows or static shadows. Not both at the same time within a certain range.
There is the possibility to don’t using CSMs or DFSs, but then the Dynamic Shadows disappear at a very low distance already.

7

my bad, stationary it is then.
and this switch to CSM happens with static objects? if so then it really is a bad behavior

8

Yeah, it’d be nice to keep Baked shadows together with CSM dynamic shadows. I mean they work with regular dynamic shadows, too…

9

You can enable percentage closer soft shadows to help with that. I think the console command was something like r.shadowfilteringmethod, set it to 1 to enable PCSS

10

You can use inset shadows for movable objects if you do not want to use CSM.

11

I also noticed something
(Working without DFSs and without CSMs):

Stationary Directional Light Shadows of Moveable objects disappear always at the same distance, regardless of Fade/Min/Max Resolution and radiusthreshold.
This is not the case for a moveable Directional Light. The console vars only work for Directional Moveable Lights!