Jagged Shadow Edges

Development Rendering
1

Hi all,

I have a small theater scene that I illuminate with point and spot lights. However, my shadows have very jagged edges, as seen below:

Jagged1.PNG
Jagged1.PNG739×393 202 KB

So far I tried:

-Increasing lightmap resolution. The weird thing is, the “jaggedness” seems to remain the exact same on different surfaces with different lightmap resolutions. Either way, I’m 100% sure this is not the issue here. Half the surfaces on the screenshot above appear red when visualizing lightmap density.

-Checking the lightmap UVs. They all seem just fine. To clarify, I’m getting the same error on a simple plane with a high res (1024) lightmap. So I’m pretty sure this is not the issue either.

-Turning area shadows on and off just to see what happens. All my lights are static, but gave it a try anyway. As expected, no difference whatsoever.

More info in case it helps:

-“Static Lighting Level Scale” is set to 0.2, and “Indirect Lighting Quality” to 3. Lighting Quality doesn’t seem to help either, both production and preview builds gave me the same result in terms of jagged edges.

-The problem occurs on both flat and smooth surfaces.

Thanks in advance.

2

I would switch to stationary lights, that way you can use dynamic shadows which don’t rely on lightmap resolution. You still get all the benefits of bounced lighting as you would with static lights.

3

Thanks for the reply. Just ran a preview lighting build, stationary lights seem to work very well. Running a production build atm, I’ll know by tomorrow morning if the problem disappears.

In case it does… In a scene with no movable objects, is there much of a difference between stationary lights and their static cousins in terms of performance? This will be a simple VR scene with only static meshes and no interaction.

4

I think static lights perform slightly better, but using stationary lights would allow you to lower your lightmap resolution and free up memory, so I think you’d actually benefit from stationary lights.