Hi I have a video that shows the black artefacts (splotches) appear in shadows and that it’s caused by SkyLight’s cast shadows option. And that the SkyLight is probably using distance field AO to produce those shadows. I am using full dynamic lighting, GI is set to None in UE 5.4. Is there a way to tweak the DFAO or the skylight somehow to remove the black artefacts cuz they are way too visible? Or at least to minimize them because they are showing up in interiors as well? Turning off the “Cast Shadows” in SkyLight or DFAO completely is not an option because I need the interior shadows and darker areas. Especially because I will have an overcast lighting scenario where all of the scene will be in shadows
well… in my low end project i have some artefacts with dfao aswell. if your scene is static you could bake a “proxy gi” solution that will retain the sky light occlusion in interiors without relying on dfao. i do that too. set the skylight to static lower the lightmaps and just a quick gpu lightmass bake. really just lowres skylight gi lightmaps and light volumes for interiors. the rest is dynamicly lit. and it uses ssao or you could change the ssao method to gtao. whatever you prefer. it’s both screenspace ao and each of them have their own artefacts.
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Thanks for the suggestion but my whole scene has to have dynamic lights because the houses can be destroyed. But I’ve managed to minimize the effect on the fence (which was the worse) and in the house is barely noticable and with some lights it will be clean. I’ve just tweaked the DFAO options a bit in the SkyLight details and what I realized is that the fence is made from one plane using masked material and that is the reason why it’s the worst (because DFAO is calculated from the plane itself and not the alpha mask), so I’m gonna try to make a full 3d model fence and see the result
For thin fences or anything sparse, use the Two-Sided Distance Field Generation setting in the static mesh editor. It is meant for foliage but works decently for chain link or rod iron fences. You might also just want to disable distance fields on assets like that.
Yeah I have tried turning on the Two-Sided Distance Field Generation but in my case it didn’t help. But thanks for letting me know what it was meant for. I have ended up just turning off the Affect Distance Field Lighting for the fences. Somehow there are still some artefacts when you look through the fences but it seems that I will just have to live with that