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!
1 Like
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.
6 Likes
@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
3 Likes
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.
4 Likes
Unfortunately the Anisotropy solution works ONLY if the material’s Opacity is close to 0 and the roughness is close to 0 also. So, while it is proper for some situations, if one wants to have the water look really good, we can’t always keep Opacity/Roughness 0.
The values you need are “artistic" - there is no ryme or reason behind them other than what you think looks good (which is subjective).
The sinlge layer water (the engine stuff) attempts to replicate water as water is supposed to be without granting excessive art direction.
In other words: if you want to make stuff look good, you need to write your own USF shader model that does what you want it to do rather than rely on what epic provides…
An alternative is to use the work Nvidia may have done for everyone and use their version of the corrected engine (get it from their git to test it).
Also consider that most of the above was before ray tracing was mainstream, so things could be different if your rendering pipeline is purely ray traced now that in 2025 it’s slightly more used (still not viable as a single rendering pipeline for a real videogame, but still more probable than before).