Well, as of 4.21, the issue still exists. Hello Epic, didn’t you say you’re now working on it?
BUMP!!
Want to know from EPIC.
In addition to slope bias It could be very helpfull to be capable of adjust the shadowdepth inside the material, to allow better shadows on noisy objects such as trees and vegetation. Another posibility will be to adjust alpha bias in masked materials for the shadows (completely masked objects to cast shadows, or adjust shadows in complicated masks).
if your alpha texture has a gradient you can very easily control the alpha bias in the shadow pass within the material, you just need a lerp with one opacity multiplier value for the base pass and another value for the shadow pass.
more info here: https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/rendering/1409241-abusing-ue4-s-reflection-system-for-cheap-translucency?p=1471402#post1471402
Awesome, thank you!! This allows to cast shadow without render to the main pass or viceversa. It is possible to change the position of the shadow also, but Is there a way to change the shadow depth per pixel?
PD: Is it possible to acces other passes with instructions via custom node?
PD2: Can I acces the cubemap in the shader without modify the engine?
EDIT: This can be used to achive a primitive slope bias, that actually correct the problems mentioned in the thread with the out of the box UE4. Im having a little trouble to get the it working on point lights tho.
yes you can you use it many ways, just keep in mind that you’re adding to the shader cost.
setting the main mesh to be invisible but the shadows visible would be possible yes (but AFAIK you can do that by making it hidden but cast hidden shadows)
changing the position of the shadow is possible as well if you use this in the WorldPositionOffset output
I don’t get what you mean with “change the shadow depth per pixel” though
I know for sure that customdepth isn’t accessible without engine modifications. other passes I don’t know if it’s possible to access them. what other passes would you have in mind?
you can access the scene’s postprocess ambientcubemap but I don’t have the info atm (but I’m not sure anyone uses the ambient cubemap anymore). I’m not sure if you can access the skylight’s cubemap. you can definitely not access the local reflection cubemaps.
to a certain extent it can help, yes.
In my UE3-based game I reduced the shadow bias a lot to have much more “contacting” shadows, and using this method in the level geometry materials alleviated the shadow acne significantly. That was UE3 though which was already abandoned by that time, and I only introduced the issue by setting the shadow bias to values that are usually outside of reason.
Having it UE4 which is actively worked on, and having the issue out of the box should put the problem on a different perspective
So in the end, is someone fixing the default shadow filter?
Hope epic show up and clarify if this issue its been solved.
It’s not been solved.
This issue has not been solved at all. KalleH and a few others are working in their free time to build a solution, so far it seems Epic hasn’t done anything to fix it.
You can easily replicate this issue by creating a new level with a landscape (sculpt some hills) and set the lights to movable. Then have a look at the shadows on the landscape.
Sorry, I mean that I hope Epic show up and say something about this issue. Its a very important one that has been solved more than a decade ago in the videogame industry. Its an important handicap to all full dynamic lighting games.
Oh my post was not an attack against you, sorry if it sounded harsh. And yes I agree with you, 100%. It seems to me that Epic tries to just ignore this issue until someone from the community fixes it for them (for free) or a big industry customer comes around and demands a fix.
Bumb, as of 4.21 last patch, the issue still exists. It’s impossible to use the landscape feature (or any kind of soft landscape) because of this shading issue.
Still a problem.
Yea we’ve run into this issue at our studio as well. Pretty frustrating and sometimes hard to hide.
It’s been 2 years since this issue appeared… It still tends to destroy dynamically lit scenes, especially a smooth stylized ones.
It would be really nice if dynamic lighting could get more love from Epic.
I agree, and it’s impossible to always hide it with meshes or other “tricks”.
But what’s even more frustrating is how Epic is ignoring the problem for two years now and tries to sweep it under the rug, likely in hope someone from the community will do the work for them to fix it…
I just tried the dev-rendering branch. After RTX ON, this bug no longer needs to be fixed(for my goal).
The whole issue is with shadow mapping not with ray tracing. Two completely separate things.
with that line of thought we’ll end up confirming that Epic is still just hiding this issue under the rug until the technology catches up, which is sad
If you go through the discussion here you can see that it’s not a problem about technology, but about how Epic is rendering shadows in Unreal Engine (as other engines do not have this problem). I agree on the first part though…