How to cast sharp shadows of skeletal meshes JUST using skylight with SLS cubemap specified set to HDR texturecube?

Development Rendering
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1

Hi,

I just want to my skeletal meshes to cast shadows in-line with direction of shadows present in HDR cubemap.
I know it’s straight forward with using DirectionalLight, but I don’t want use DirectionalLight for some obvious reasons. Only light I’ve is Skylight with Source type set to SLS Specified Cubemap. When I was searching I found this blog link (http://timhobsonue4.snappages.com/lighting-capsule-shadows) in the forum that explains about indirect capsule shadows. Somewhat it looks reasonable but these shadows are not clear/sharp enough to produce the effect I wanted.

This is what i currently arrived at using the solution provided in the link:

254090-skeletalmesh.jpg
254090-skeletalmesh.jpg1920×1040 217 KB

Further I want shadows of these skeletal meshes just as the shadow of barrel-like object in the above image.
I think there must be a work-around to

  1. align these capsule shadows with shadows in the image and
  2. make them more clear and directional as much as possible

I also tweaked some lightmass settings as suggested in other forum answers but that didn’t help me. :frowning:

Here are lightmass settings:

254103-lightmass-settings.png
254103-lightmass-settings.png566×608 14.5 KB

Skeletal mesh Lighting details:

254104-skeletalmesh-details.png
254104-skeletalmesh-details.png666×826 48.4 KB

And Skylight details:

254105-skylight-details.png
254105-skylight-details.png636×866 55.7 KB

Please note performance is not my top priority.

Please suggest me, if i’m missing something obvious.

Thank you :slight_smile:

2

Still I couldn’t find any way to solve this. Any clues/suggestions are welcome!!!

3

I don’t know much about lighting, but I would try the following:

  1. Turn off capsule shadows.
  2. Set the Lightmap Resolution of the floor to a much higher number.

See if either of those or both together improves your shadow shapes.

4

Yes, Increasing lightmap resolution slightly gives better results

As of now, Ray-tracing (with appropriate hardware) might be only solution I think. I didn’t give it a try though since i don’t have required hardware.