I’m not sure if this would fall into the Rendering section or the Content Creation. I’ve been playing around with lighting in a scene and something that is annoying me is that one object I’ve created, a door frame, has a few noticeable extrusions (modeled after a real hinged frame); and for some reason, those extrusions fade away when I’m not standing directly in front of it. Not only does it fade away, but you can very clearly see it “materializing” into view as you get closer or materializing away as you get further. I don’t have any LOD set for it, it’s just a single object. With that said, I’ve added the frame and the door itself into a blueprint that includes an opening animation so all I need to do is place the door and its frame in one go.
Sadly, because it has an automatic depreciation in its quality when not even 5 feet away, the shadow that the frame casts on top of the door also only waits until you’re right near it to pop up. There’s also the small shadow that the door knob casts, it is invisible until in range, then pops ups with a mediocre shadow quality, and when you turn the camera right up on it, the shadow is nice and sharp. All of these issues are caused depending on how far the camera is to the object.
As you can see from this video here (ignore that huge blast of light exposure), the shadow waits until the camera is a certain distance before rendering its shadow. (The shadow quality reduction from a distance is fine, but the fact that its waiting to appear entirely is the problem). I’ve tried adjusting a few options such as the shadow map, improving a few settings related to draw-distance, but most of those ended up with the door frame becoming completely invisible for some reason or just not improving anything. The light in that room is set to cast shadows. When I disabled it, it was much harder to tell if the door was still materializing into view, and it was much more acceptable and looked alright. But with the light casting shadows, it’s fully noticeable. The light is set to stationary. I’ve also tried changing the Bounds Scale on the frame, and while it worked, it also changed the overall color to a darker tone for some reason, and the shadow quality is still visibly popping into low res > high res right in front of the camera. I also am not sure if its right to be adjusting these types of settings for such a simple object that I would more than likely place multiple of within a level.
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I’m not sure if this would fall into the Rendering section or the Content Creation. I’ve been playing around with lighting in a scene and something that is annoying me is that one object I’ve created, a door frame, has a few noticeable extrusions (modeled after a real hinged frame); and for some reason, those extrusions fade away when I’m not standing directly in front of it.”
alter the size smaller or reduce poly. May have to redo
Could you clarify a bit as to what you mean exactly by altering the size? Do you mean reducing the lightmap, or the size of the object completely? I tried placing, separately, the door and the frame meshes down, and there were no issues with the shadow at all. I could see it from far away and it had a nice quality at that distance. The fading in/out of the extrusions on the frame were still happening though. Sadly, when I put the door and frame back into the blueprint, the shadow issue started happening again. What’s causing the blueprint to fail at rendering shadows from a distance?
It would suck if it wasn’t able to render the frame mesh. It’s detailed, sure, but it’s not thousands of tris, so I’m not sure why it’s not rendering the whole mesh instead of just the basic shape until I get very close.
Try changing the poly count if possible. You may have to rebuild. Look at textures they sometimes fight for dominacy. I cant find it but in this video or the one before it he shos that issue. - YouTube. Two mwshes at same level. Try offseting more.
Hi. Ok so I’ve looked at that thread and something that did help tremendously was changing the r.Shadow.TexelPerPixels value to 5. Now I’m able to see the shadows with nice quality even at a distance. Is there any negative drawback to setting the value up so high from the default? And if I have times where I want to change the setting for a specific area in my level, will the console command affect the whole project (or more like if I run into another situation like this and want to set it up even higher.? None of the other commands did anything except the Texels.
I looked at the video and also the one before it (#5), but unfortunately I didn’t see anything that related to my problem with the frame mesh. Something I’ve noticed is now that the shadows aren’t popping away and appearing correctly, it’s much harder to tell that the frame mesh is loading the rest of its detail. But if I run at the frame quickly, you can see the jagged edges appearing while its loading that detail (as if no AA is applied while its rendering itself), and only after it finishes loading, it becomes smooth. That’s the best way to describe the “materialization” effect that I’m seeing. Is there no way around that? I’m not sure if its because of the lighting or what. Would importing a proper LOD change anything? I would hate for the only solution to be to reduce the polys in the mesh, because I purposely modeled the detail into the mesh (a normal map wouldn’t be able to do this) and I’d hope there would be a better solution. Thanks!