How to soften shadows for stationary directional light

In my night scene I use a stationary directional light with low intensity and blue-ish color to simulate moon light. However, the (movable) actors in my level cast a very sharp shadow. That doesn’t look very realistic, as in the real world it seems during the night shadows from the moon light are often much softer.

So my question is: What settings do I need for my stationary directional light to soften shadows in the scene? I have red the documentation of course, and also tried to play around with various settings, but without luck, the shadows always keep their sharp edges :frowning:

Thanks in advance for any hints and tips!

Stationary lights can adjust shadow penumbra for the baked distance field shadows, but not for dynamic shadows. You will have to adjust your lights cascade shadow settings and/or your projects shadow resolution settings to soften the dynamic shadows. You could try things like “r.shadow.maxresolution 512” or smaller numbers to see what that does.

Hi Ryan, thanks for your quick reply. I have tried to set the “r.shadow.maxresolution” setting via console, as you have suggested. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to have any effect at all. Regardless of whether I set it 512, 64 or 1024 the shadow of a movable object stays exactly the same. (Btw. setting it to 1 crashes the Editor.)

Also, I cannot find the shadow resolution settings in the project settings. Where do I find that?

As for the cascade shadow settings, I am not sure whether they help in my case, as I the movable actor and its shadow is quite close to the camera. Or have I missunderstood its purpose?

Hi Haimat,

Just want to update that the crash with r.shadow.maxresolution 1 has been fixed in our 4.9 build. Thanks for pointing that out.

Tim

Fine, thanks for your feedback :slight_smile: