Dear Epic Team,
trying to dig into the many different possibilities of lighting and shadowing a scene, which turns out to be a quite confusing journey, I’d like to propose some feature, that might be useful for debugging:
It could be really useful to have an editor visualization mode, that shows, which type of shadow is actually currently applied to pixels in a given scene, using some color coding scheme. E.g. having color codes for
CSM shadow
CSM far shadow
static shadow from light/shadowmaps
Distance Field shadow (raytraced or indirect)
and more like capsule shadows…
Just a rough idea, but I believe, that this could be a useful feature for debugging and level design. Currently, it is not possible to see, which algorithm actually is responsible for the shadows, that are seen on screen - a little bit like ‘black is black’ as in that old song
Digging in the forums, I found this one in the snippets section, by @ozzmeister002 . At a very first glance, it looks a little bit like what I’m looking for, although this is visualizing CSM shadows only. Not yet checked this one.
Again, I believe such a functionality would be extremely useful, because sometimes you see shadowing looking right, but you cannot see, which algorithm is actually responsible, especially if switching between SM5 and ES31 preview…
You’re right that that’s only showing CSM shadows. I’d meant that to visualize the different cascades although I think with maybe a blueprint that pulls data from the directional light, you could adapt it to show the kind of data you’re looking for (IE one color for CSM, one for DF shadows, and one for Far Shadows). It won’t give you any information about static or capsule shadows, though.
