I’m somewhat buggered by getting small objects look like they are really stuck/touching on semi-gloss surfaces like wooden floors etc.
The realistic rendering showcase looks awesome but features this very issue on most of the objects touching other surfaces.
Especially stuff like lamps, cups, plates seem to ‘float’ because there is too little contact shadow.
The only thing I’m doing now to remedy this is placing more shadowcasters but I’d very much like to know
if there’s more to this or if it just can’t be achieved in Unreal as-is right now?
SSAO on very narrow helps a tiny bit but causes a host of other issues so as far as I’m concerned that’s kind of a no.
Increasing Lightmap res seems to help very little too.
Its the lack of contact shadows for sure and as far as I know the SSAO trick is the only fix right now but I think I saw something somewhere (either here on the forum or on the roadmap) about a fix maybe coming. I think SSDO would be a fix for it too, not sure if we have that in UE4…
SSAO set on radius to actually catch these small outlines causes a lot of issues during rendering. Also it just looks weird. I’m kind of amazed this is an issue in UE4. In CE3 you can even apply a negative shadow bias causing way more convincing contact shadows without artifacts popping like it’s pixel-festival. I’m fully aware we’re talking realtime rendering here but still, given the fact Lightmass isn’t exactly the most speedy on the block, one might as well bake scenes like this entirely with FlatIron and Vray and only then import them cause realism-wise it will look at least truly convincing/realistic. Would be nice for sure to know this is getting some attention in a later iteration of the engine!
