smear campaign continues? yeh…
not sure why you wanna go back to csm for directional lights. basic looking shadows. sharp is boring. you never build an overcast scene with raytraced shadows? beautiful soft shadows. even vsm doesn’t do that. the noise is normal. you gotta life with it, if you want soft shadows. the temporal dithering/vector randomization is the bread and butter to make soft shadows possible without computing billions of samples/rays.
also as of current 5.5 csm is still supported for directional lights. you gotta use it, if you want to shadow fog volumes, cause the raytraced directional light currently doesn’t do that.
masked materials is on my list too. it’s a big ask for low poly foliage shadows. you can use geometry and make holes in it in most other cases. or use nanite leaves. so what?!?
i for sure like an optimized “low poly” pipeline too. nanite has use cases, like sculpts and rocks and detailed geometry and foliage lod, but is useless for normal urban geometric shapes and houses. it’s a choice you can make. you don’t have to use it if you don’t wnat to. huh?!?
the push for vsm is what annoys me a lil. small video memory here. wanna push raytracing and still do this bloat of shadow mapping tech. weirdge, for sure. but megalights replaces that fairly well. gotta find optimization for some types of scenes, tho.
when we gonna see footage of your game, btw? it’s coming along?