So dabbling around last night I found that I have two problems.
the first one is that if the emissive color is darker than, say, 180 = I get horrible shadows in the crevices of the backside of the mesh. If I kick the color up, the shadows return to normal.
I tried this with lumen and screen space reflections.
the second is that the multiplication after sine or cosine breaks the shadows on the top layer, while if
I use a power node instead (does not matter what the power is) it fixes the shadows on the top and the emissive still breaks them on the bottom.
the problem with the power node is without some form of smoothing it is very blocky because of the exponential timing. multiplication is smoother.
One noticable difference is that exponential does not go negative, it stays flat and then increases while cosine with multiplication goes -1, 0, 1 (or .25 offset in case of sine).
The shadows are much improved in the actual level if I place a plane or box, the box seems to do better because its not utilizing unreal’s “two sided” option which I suppose is too much to ask for the engine to work with that and these janky sine waves.
However, the shadows still look “noisy” I kicked shadows to highest, lumen to highest, SSR to highest
ray cast shadows, and literally no difference.
Is it supposed to look like this?
