Hi! Just tried new 4.13 feature-contact shadows, it looks great, but I wonder if it has any other options except shadows length. This feature works pretty bad with dithered masks - there is a lot of high frequency noise in shadows from hair, eyelashes, eyebrows. I know, this is a post process feature, but is there any way to turn off contact shadows for some meshes? And another question-is there any way to blur borders of contact shadows to make it a little bit softer? And what is the performance hit of contact shadows. Thanks.
o.O Where did you get 4.13 ?
Here Twitch somewhere after 54m Mike Fricker says that contact shadows feature is in master branch on Github.
Interesting. First time hear about it. Is it in 4.12.5 by chance? (video seems to be about 4.12, so maybe it’s lurking in there already)
No, 4.12.5 doesn’t have this feature. You should build master branch of ue4 from Github (according to splashscreen and “about…” it’s 4.13). It have contact shadows, editor environment presets and maybe something else…(dynamic animations maybe?)
What do you guys mean by “contact shadows”? Is it similar to AO? If so, what’s the advantage of this over AO? I have a build of 4.13 on my PC at home, but I didn’t see anything about this when I searched around for new features…
Eidt: Watched the twitch stream, I was just looking into doing something like this last night for some high poly models. Looks awesome. How do you enable it?
It’s enabled by default. You should set “contact shadows length” parameter in light’s properties to some small value, like 0.05. Also, there is a r.ContactShadows console variable, but seems it do nothing… Contact shadows length looks good only for some camera distance, so it might be a good idea to link them to each other.
Now that the feature is enabled, I too would like to know how to get better quality contact shadows if it’s at all possible. Even setting the length to 0.05 does not result in good quality shadowing. There needs to be a way to increase the rays and samples, either in the light settings, project rendering settings, or ini settings.