Forward Rendering Shadows Quality

So I switched to forward rendering for some performance gains (+50% somehow!!)
But now my shadows look bleh the further away they are.

I want all of the shadows to be as sharp as the bottom of the image.

The distance before it lowered the quality in deffered was much larger, which was fine cause it is only a small map. I’d prefer to stay in forward rendering because FPS and MSAA.

I’m thinking its something to do with cascading shadow maps but I can’t get a match of settings to make it all sharp.

When I disable Cascading shadow maps I get this monstrosity.

My light source is a Directional Light set to stationary, however changing it to movable changes nothing.

I’m sure there are settings I am missing or other ways around it, I just can’t seem to find them. Thanks

bumbyboo :smiley:

Forward rendering doesn’t support a lot of features, so the performance gains are from things being disabled.

That’s just how cascade shadows work, you don’t have infinite resolution so you get lower and lower levels of detail the further away something is. You can increase the number of cascades or limit the distance to increase the quality.

You can also try the console commands for r.Shadow.MaxResolution and Shadow Filter Sharpen.

Lightmap resolution is too low. Has nothing to do with the forward renderer.

the monstrosity is called a distance field shadow. the shape depends on the geometry and voxel resolution used for the amount of details in it. that can be seen in the show menu under visualize->mesh distance fields.

to get crisper cascade shadows you can increase the resolution via “r.Shadow.MaxCSMResolution”. you also have directional light controls like bias distribution and distribution exponent that manage the lod transition distances. that’s most of what you may want to try.

Thankyou,
I had tried adjusting the bias distribution and exponent but that did net the result i was looking for, however the part i was evidently missing was adjusting the CSM res. i changed it from 2048 to 8192 and bang, exactly what i was looking for. Now to see what its effect on performance is, so far i haven’t noticed much at all which is a bonus.

So the default 64 is garbage?

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