I’m running into an issue where the Virtual Shadow Maps are being created while the landscape is still loading in. As the landscape streams in, it first appears in a very low resolution–all blocky like a Minecraft world. The virtual shadow maps are created at this point, which of course makes weird, jagged shadows. When the landscape finishes loading in, it gets smooth, but the shadows are still jagged.
These shadows do clear up when the player turns or moves far enough, but I’d prefer we don’t have the bad shadows at all. Can I tell the engine to refresh the Virtual Shadow Maps once the landscape is fully loaded? Or is this more about making sure the shadow maps are generated later in the loading process?
Did you ever get this resolved? I have the exact same issue. As the map loads, the virtual shadow map looks ugly but then clears up as the camera moves. I would do a refresh if it was possible to trigger it or maybe delay it until the scene is fully loaded.
i want to know this as well. I am using dynamic tesselation in nanite for rain puddles. Flattens out the ground… but the shadows look aweful until i turn the camera and basica refresh the virtual shadow maps. Anyway to make them refresh instantly when i want?
In 5.3/5.4 you can set the shadow cache invalidation behavior manually in the actor settings, I believe it can probably also be set from blueprint. If you know an actor is going to be constantly changing from tessellation you can set the invalidation behavior to “always” and it should mark the cached pages and force them to regenerate every frame.
Obviously, this will have an impact on performance. Such is life.
