There is a very big flaw in The lighting system in unreal as I have come to learn. in that lightmass always makes terrain shadows as a set sharpness I cannot for the life of me figure out how to stop this. I mean in the editor you can place a sphere over a landscape and the shadow is nice. you can even move it further away from the terrain and the shadow gets software “more penumbra”. You can also adjust the light source angle and you can see the shadow the way it should be. But as soon as you bake it goes back to that **** ugly black sharp shadow. why can we just have the shadow as they are in the editor baked? And again I’m not talking about how dark the shadow is. I can adjust the environment or add a skylight and control that.
Stationary lights use a method for storing their static shadowing (distance field shadow maps) that don’t support area lights. If you switch to Static it will support the LightSourceAngle after the base, but Static lights have a lot of other problems (characters can’t integrate with it).
Even though Stationary lights produce a constant penumbra size, you can tweak how soft that is with DistanceFieldPenumbraSize in ProjectSettings->RendererSettings.
Not the answer I was looking for but it looks like this is all sorted out in 4.5. will the new shaders work on landscapes as well? or just geometry?