Directional light shadows are blurry after updating to UE5 latest release

Development Asset Creation
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1

Hi, not sure anyone has had this issue after updating to latest UE5 version. My shadows were sharper and crispier in UE5 Early Access 2, and after upgrading to UE5 latest release which was launched today, they got blurrier. I will share my project settings and screen shot here below. if someone has a solution, it is much appreciated. Thanks

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If you need further info to debug, I can give them.

2

Same thing here I can’t figure it out. Also nanite meshes are only rendering as their proxies. And Lumen scene is all broken again. Preview 2 was working so well

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3

Must be a bug. Hopefully they will fix it soon.

4

figured it out it looks like switching to rhi directx 12 fixed it

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I tried switching RHI to DirectX 12, but foliage in the scene is acting very weird. Shadows are very crisp, but they cast dark shadows and look like broken. I also have sunlight coming through transparent glass and they act like opaque after the switch. I changed it back to default. :frowning:
RHI Default:

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RHI DirectX 12:
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RHI Default:
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RHI DirectX 12:
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6

Hmm i know in the Lumen thread people were saying foliage lighting got darker in this release. Translucency is not casting any shadows in my scenes

7

Same exact issue.
In Preview 2 translucency worked properly, not sure why the downgrade.
Do you guys have issues with Nanite in DirectX 11?

8

I haven’t used any nanite meshes in my scene yet, so not sure

9

Think I figured it out. When I change the ‘Num Dynamic Shadow Cascades’ to a higher value, it casts better sharper shadows for alpha cards. Also Under ‘Engine scalability settings’, I set shadows to ‘Cinematic’ and that has a very obvious effect. Since I don’t have any gameplay in my scene, it should be fine.

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Now I need to figure out why shadows go blurry when i zoom out
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10

Ahh cool I think this is what virtual shadow maps in ue5 is trying to solve. As you look to further shadow cascades, shadow resolution goes down to preserve memory. There are cvar commands you can use to try and get better results and you can use ‘far cascades’ but I have been loving virutal shadow maps for this

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11

Did you ever stumble upon a solution to this problem? More specifically the blurry shadows issue.

I’m experiencing the same thing now and it’s a pretty big pain to try and deal with!