Lumen shadows/occlusion on stylized foliage

[ROG_Cybrex]

So two issues.

First one which started happening out of nowhere is that random parts of my grass have weird shadows on them, even tho my grass doesnt cast shadows at all. They also disappear if i get too close:

Second issue which i’ve been trying to properly fix for a while is that lumen occlusion ■■■■■ up foliage hard for me as well as lumen software tracing itself.

The only solution for the second issue so far was by manually turning off “short range ambient occlusion” and setting hzbtraversal to 0:

Default:

Short range ambient occlusion off:

occlusion off + hzbt off:

This is obviously no real solution so i’d like to know if there is any proper way of fixing this.
Also for the weird shadows on some of my grass patches that shouldnt be there at all.

Thanks in advance!

[ROG_Cybrex]

Is it really only me?

[BananableOffense]

Pic 1 looks like contact shadows. Not sure why they’d be on for some but not all grass (maybe some models have it disabled but others have it enabled), but its possible for an asset to cast contact shadows even if regular shadows are turned off. If that’s not it, then no idea.
As for the others, the only real solutions are what you’ve done plus consider turning off “affects distance field lighting” which created occlusion patches on the terrain for me, even after the grass was culled.

[ROG_Cybrex]

I fixed it!

So the weird partial shadows came from the virtual shadow maps.

All i had to do was switching my grass and leaves material to the “two sided foliage” shading model instead of default lit.

That basically fixed both issues since i did not see any of these weird shadows since then, even with virtual shadowmaps on.

I dont have to use the commands either as that would now make it look worse.

[BananableOffense]

Ah yes, that is an important setting. Lumen treats foliage assets quite differently than other assets, and that is how it knows which method to use. Glad you figured it out.