Distance Field Shadows on mobile?

Development Rendering
1

Hi,

I’m currently working on a project for an Nvidia Shield tablet. Under the device manager it says Distance Field Shadowing is an available feature on the Shield, but I can’t get them to appear when running the game. I’ve built the project for ES3.1 and the ES3.1 Deferred Rendering Shader. I can see them in the editor (and the object is turned on in rendering settings). Anyone know what could be wrong?

Thankyou!

2

Hello,

I’m just trying to figure out the same and I’ve been searching for answers for long time without any luck. The online documentation, under Mobile Lighting, states that distance field shadows are supported. I got them to appear in the editor too but not on the device (Samsung S8 and device manager also states it supports them). I’ve posted this in the AnswerHub too.

3

Hello,

At this point I’m a bit frustrated with the documentation for mobile developing being in some instances outdated and others lacking detail. It is also confusing that to switch from one shadowing system (cascade, modulated, distance field) to another there are several settings all spread out in different places.

I don’t need an answer to why it’s not working in my case, I just simply want to know: has anyone successfully used distance field shadows in an Android project? I will appreciate also if someone from Epic could confirm this and hopefully post a short how-to for mobile platform.

Thanks.

4

It does work. Turn light movability to stationary, bake lighting and you should see sharp static shadows that are sampled from 2d distance field on mobile. But if you referred to distance field raytraced shadows then they are not supported. Distance field volumes are SM5 feature only.

5

Thank you Ichijo,

I assumed that raytraced distance field shadows and distance field shadows referred to the same. I wasn’t able to find the distinction in the documentation with a quick search but I’ll try digging in more.