Hello guys,
I got a question that bothers me,
I’d appericiate it if somebody could answer me this:
- When should I use Distance Field Shadowing and when Shadowmapping?
- When should I enable Distance Field Ambient Occlusion? What changes?
I assume you are on about Dynamic shadow mapping, here are the differences:
Dynamic cascaded shadows are done on a per poly calculation. This is quite expensive when you begin to render large scale scenes. To account for this UE4 does cull the shadow at certain distances. Hence you may see shadows suddenly disappear when moving far away from an object.
DFAO on the other hand basically creates a volume surrounding each imported mesh, hence the shadows are instead calculated based on the volume rather than the polygons. This means render calculations are cheaper as stated in the documentation.
You are also able to mix the two methods together. For close up objects these are rendered based on polygon basis, then in the distance you can render further away shadows using DFAO.
The other thing is DFAO also is a solution for dynamic lighting. This is still in development however they plan on making DFAO have GI bounce lighting.
You can read more about it here: Distance Field Ambient Occlusion in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine Documentation
Well thank you for your detailed explanation,
the idea of mixing them together is good, i will implement that 