Material changes appearance depending on distance from camera

Development Rendering
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I’m pretty new to UE and while it has some great capabilities I also get very frustrated when something weird happens and I can’t figure out why, its such an enormous program its nearly impossible to troubleshoot. I’ve looked on forums/online and can’t find this anywhere. Part of the problem is that I am using this software only for Archviz/animations, and so many answers out there have to do with game development which isn’t always relevant to what I’m doing.

Anyway I downloaded the Shadersource River Tool from the Marketplace a few weeks ago and it works well. I have created my own river instances with modified materials to suit what I am trying to show. What’s strange is suddenly (a few days ago) the water now changes appearance depending on how far away the camera is from it, and I have no idea why. There are no actors overlapping, I tried checking/unchecking the distance field boxes, which seems to sometimes help and sometimes not (which makes no sense to me… I have more than one river in my scene, and sometimes if I uncheck the box for River A, the appearance of River B changes even though they’re not linked). I tried checking/unchecking “2 sided material” which would make it look ok in the viewport, but then when I render the animation it still looks wrong. I deleted the river and material and made a fresh copy from what came with the Tool, and it’s still doing it.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks

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What are the lights in the scene? Are they static, stationary, or movable?

Directional lights have distance field settings, and cascaded shadow map settings. These comprise two different types of shadowing, and can sometimes render differently based on the settings. If CSM is 5000, and DFS is 20,000, then shadows are going to be rendered with CSM from camera distance 0 to 5000. While shadows from DFS are used for camera distance 5000 to 20,000. It might be the DFS (distance field shadows) is the wrong shadowing, resulting in the wrong look of the river(s) depending on camera distance, and it might be because the river’s mesh/material settings are not correct in regard to distance fields. I’m not familiar with the Shadersource River Tool, and I tried that link without being able to access what’s in it because my old password didn’t work for signing in. Is the river tool made up of spline meshes, or how is it basically set up?

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I played around with the directional light CSM/DFS settings and it seems to have worked… thanks