Hi, I’m using the megascans european trees in unreal but have an issue.
When I use an HDRI to light the scen the shadows are just rendered a certain distance (see image). However, when i light the scene using unreal’s directional light together with a sky and atmosphere everything works fine.
Why does the trees have no shadow far away when i light the scene using an HDRI?
I have a similar issue that I have posted on here: Tree shadows disappear with distance
I think it has something to do with the ambient occlusion or whatever it’s called for Lumen. As far as I understand, Lumen has replaced SSAO, RTAO, DFAO etc with its own built-in system and I can’t find the setting for increasing the tracing distance for this in particular.
However, I think you will find that you get direct shadows if you are using a directional light, that is at least the case for me. But you still lose the ‘‘ambient occlusion’’ with the distance. So it has something to do with the skylight/more homogeneous lighting and Lumen.
Yeah, I’ll keep an eye on that thread also!
Thanks for your insights from trubleshooting the issue and let us hope we find a solution to our problem
While lumen is great, it’s still not on par with regular offline renderers. You can’t just throw in high contrast HDRI map and expect lumen to resolve sharp shadows. You still need to do a clumsy workaround of using clamped HDRI map together with directional light source. Hopefully this will be better in future, but right now it is what it is.
Since you are relying solely on lumen for your direct illumination, you will need to increase lumen distance settings in the lumen section of your postprocess volume. But even if it solves the shadowing or more distant objects, it will still not solve the issue of lumen not providing accurate and sharp enough illumination from high contrast HDRI maps with bright sun disc.
Thank you for replying Rawalanche!
Changing distance did the trick!
But I’m totaly with you, lumen is not really there yet
Increasing ‘‘Lumen Scene View Distance’’ did the trick for me! Thanks.
