How to get rid of blocky shadows on Ocean surface in UE5?

Has anyone ran into these strange blocky shadows when using the Ocean/Water System in UE5? I can’t seem to get rid of them. I’ve tried lighting setups with the ELM and UltraDynamic Sky.

Thanks and have a great day!

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Check the water material/mesh.

Water is supposed to take shadow as a transparency. If your material isnt transparent, then you need to disable both shadow casting and shadow receiving, or at the very least adjust the color of the received shadow to be less dark…

It’s been a year, anyone find a way to get better shadows? The only answer here does not help, since the shadow issue is with “Single Surface Water” materials, which are technically opaque. Very frustrating seeing so many questions asked on the forums here and going years without answers. Epic really needs to set up their support game.

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@MorganGhan @VexFX
finally found a solve to this problem by googling some related CVARs

Hi, i had a very similar issue with the shadows of some trees projected on the surface of my pond in the forest. For me what sorted it out has been to go in the material settings then, under Water Shading, tick the Anisotropy option and set a value higher than 0.1

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So I found that changing the WaterBodyOcean → Details → Rendering → Water Material [double click material to open in asset window]. From here select Water Shading → Antisotropy to something closer to 1.0 caused the shadows to look substantially more realistic.

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