I am working on a flat-looking art-style that is dependent on shadows highlighting the details in meshes, however I can’t figure out if it is possible to make shadows on finer detail appear a bit further away. Since we have a locked third-person camera many objects lack their shadow details and will never get them since players won’t zoom in close enough. Is it possible to force them appear from further away somehow?
Example of the issue: https://i.gyazo.com/af0c60357938da08fba54de29ccacee3.mp4
Increase this to something like 10:
Try to search about distance field shadow and how to enable it.
Unfortunately none of the suggested changes has any effect on distance at which the detailed shadows kick in. I did manage achieving what I was after somehow as seen in the following GIF: https://i.gyazo.com/7fff6aa6d67d00f8186005c840fdfeb4.mp4
However, I don’t really know how. The shadows are infinite range and dynamic, however the effect seems bugged as neither cascaded shadow maps or distance field shadow settings have any effect and I can’t reproduce the effect in a new map.
Looks like you enabled raytraced shadows which would be why CSM/DF settings have no effect.
I thought so, but I can’t seems to replicate it in a new project - ray tracing enabled, light set to movable and cast ray traced shadows with cascades off. No shadows at all. Is there something else that needs to be enabled?
The ray traced shadows look good, but it would be nice if it’s possible to enable details for longer distance on cascading too for GPUs that don’t support raycasting.
Bump, nobody knows how to force longer range on details without ray tracing?
imho you’d be better off baking shadows into an AO texture than relying on dynamic shadows (which might be disabled on lower tier systems or off lower res). this way you get a persistent look on all systems/platforms. if you make them subtle/neutral enough they will properly work also in changing lighting conditions. there’re plenty tutorials out there for each ddc package; try searching for “baking ao textures”. or you could even try vertex painting in unreal if your assets have sufficient polycounts…