Learning the use cases for Ray Tracing re: landscapes and foliage. Would love a more experienced eye on this.
This picture is pretty typical of my landscape experiments. I can guess at this point all these terrible looking jagged sharp shadows on the landscape is the result of Ray Tracing casting against low resolution terrain height images?
If you turn off the Directional Light’s Cast Ray Tracing Shadows Option, you actually get something that looks much more natural feeling: the landscape loses the sharp jagged faceting; foliage’s dynamic shadows move with the wind and don’t remain static.
Anyone figured out how to get the best of both worlds? Or should a designer just jettison Ray Tracing features all together for Landscapes?
Foliage shadows with RT on / off
*credit to Joe Garth and Brushify.IO assets
EDIT: I’ve since found the Shadow Source Angle Factor slider in the Dir. Light, and that does make some difference to the RT shadows if I crank that sucker way above 5. But the sharpness of the main shadow shapes still persist–and I’ll chalk that up to the height field resolution, and can only just mitigate it with smoothing out the landscape with the sculpt tools.
Intuitively, a 4k height map really shouldn’t produce such sharp edges, but I’m no expert and welcome being told what I have wrong. Maybe it’s a color range issue of the height field image? RAW vs sRGB?
