Hey folks, been trying to pry open this issue for a week now with no luck. I am getting these dark black shadows on foliage or anything that it touches. It looks like an ambient occlusion issue, but none of the AO settings in the skylight or the post process volume will get rid of it. The shadows also trail and ghost even with anti-aliasing disabled.
Lumen is disabled in this project (not interested in using it)
Two sided distance field generation doesn’t affect it, though in UE4, this was the fix for the same issue - so there’s something interesting there. In UE5 it no longer fixes it.
I am relying on SSAO and Distance field AO for my graphics so I can’t completely disable them.
If I turn the tangent space normals off, the shadows go away, but the shading on the trees looks bad, so that’s not a viable solution either.
I’m using 5.5
Any help would be HUGELY appreciated. I’m going crazy changing every possible lighting setting.
I’d first set your scalability to Epic as a baseline, sometimes performance levels can have weird effects on certain issues. Second off, what direct shadowing method are you using? If you visualize shadow mask, are you seeing VSMs?
Hi thanks for the reply.
Issue still appears when set to Epic.
I’m using only movable lights even for the directional light and skylight.
I am certain now that the issue is related to the Distance Fields somehow as disabling them completely in project settings gets rid of the issue at the cost of no longer having nice AO. I would like to use DFAO though so I still need a fix.
There are no DF settings that I can change that fix the issue.
I’ve tried all the settings in the skylight and the mesh. I’m worried this is a rendering bug with UE5.
Re: Shadow mask. I don’t see VSMs, only Lit or Unlit as Yellow and Blue.
I’ll try to pull it up for you, but I think you should probably use lumen at this point. I could be remembering an old version, but I believe at one point there was a mode for lumen that was basically just AO+sky occlusion. If you’re looking to use SSAO and DFAO simultaneously, lumen would be your best bet. I’ll do some thinking on it, but I can’t easily figure out what’s causing your rendering issues without more information. Turning off tangent space normals gives me a hint it’s an SSAO issue (bc it shouldn’t impact DFAO in any way) but beyond that I’m just not sure.
