Hi,
I recently switched the main direction light to movable in the level so that I could implement a basic day night cycle. It resulted in some really strange things happening.
- the shadow quality doped dramatical
- It seamed to light and static meshes that had opaque or sub surface scattering settings in a weird way
I extended the Dynamic shadow distance to encompass the whole scene which helped with the weird static mesh lighting and increased the number of cascades to 10 to try and retain some quality in the shadows but obviously with the scene being large the shadow quality dropped even further.
Here is a video which shows the problems I’m having.
The effect I’m trying to achieve is a sun set followed by night time followed by sun rise. I don’t really need a day time in the game as the game starts as the sun sets and ends when the sun rises. The camera cold even be stationary or use a matinee sequence during the sun set and rise phases followed by the game play taking place during the night time. If there is a different way to achieve this effect which results in a better visual effect, I’m all ears.
Maybe using different lighting techniques, setting up matinee to emulate a sun rise and sun set, Using multiple lights at different distances to improve shadow quality, setting the directional light to stationary and rotating everything else in the level instead (although that could mess up any physics and particle effects etc)?
Any suggestions to help me resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated, also the night time in the game seams far to bright which is a separate issue but if you can point me in the right direction on that I would appreciate it.
cheers