Hey guys, I have had this problem for a while and cant find a way to fix it. Im using foliage from SpeedTree and when DFAO is active I get this pitch black spots that make everything looks so fake, I have tried many parameters but nothings working.
This is the scene
Its intersting that changing the DFAO tint the black spots still remains
Does anybody knows that might be happening?
It might be from too many intersecting planes. This will cause shadows to appear extra dark on materials like this. Also, is your directional light set to dynamic or static? The black shadows are probably coming from it and not from the DFAO.
It is definitly the DFAO, when I dissable it the black dissapears. Directional light its set to dynamic.
That seems to be the solution but I cant find “Generate Distance Field As If Two Sided” anywhere. It is suppoused to be in the static mesh settings but its not there, theres only “Double sided geometry” but it doesnt seems to do anything. Any ideas?
Im using ue4.14 btw
look for “build settings” on each LOD and expand it 
Found it! Changed that to all my meshes but nothing has changed…
there should be a really slight change at the very least. you did click on the Apply Changes button on the build settings, right?
I did indeed, then Mesh Distance Fields were generated but nothing changed.
try increasing the resolution and see if it change !
I tweaked all the settings along with Distance Field Resolution scale but nothing happened! I even changed the Distance Field Replacement Mesh so some other mesh and no improvement 
This is how my scene looks right now:
I have it too, and I think it has something to do with the HDR (Eye Adaption) I can see blue at the same places in the Show -> Visualize -> HDR (Eye Adaption) ???
I can only think about two things :
1- use PixelDepthOffset maybe it is a problem of self oclusion or play with the bias in the static mesh parameters
2- play with min oclusion
can you post the MeshDistanceField vizualisation ? maybe the problem is there
Hey there! The problem is still here. I have searched for PixelDepthOffset and found this interesting picture but no information with it at all, at it seems to be similar to my problem:
Also I have tried the min occlusion setting but it doesnt change the pitch black color.
Here are the visualizations:
if the min occlusion setting dont affect the black spot it is not the DFAO !
what you could do is to create a new project (empty) empty level and put one tree and a movebal sky light and see
if it still there try uploading this new project and i will take a look (try minimize the size i have a pretty bad connexion here )
Sorry for the necropost, but does anyone know how to fix this?
I’m still running into this issue in 4.20.1 and can’t find a good solution for it. Even setting the meshes’ “distance field resolution scale” to 0 doesn’t get rid of the dark spots on SpeedTree foliage. As mentioned by Dvidae, they disappear when “cast shadows” on the sky light is turned off.
Increasing the sky light’s “Min Occlusion” value helps, but since that also negatively impacts the occlusion of other areas, it’s not a great solution.
Did anyone solve this?
I don’t think there’s a real solution for this, unfortunately. It appears to be a limitation of DFAO.
I recently created another thread on the topic here, and although there were some suggestions that alleviate the issue, nothing could fix it entirely. I also asked about it on AnswerHub, but didn’t receive any replies over there.
The AO value in the material has to be almost completely black in order to make the black spots invisible, which is the opposite of what I’d want to achieve. I think the goal is to make the ‘over-occlusion’ brighter (or remove it entirely), rather than making everything else darker. 
So, no fix available to now?
