RayTraced DistanceField Shadows on Mac OS X

Development Rendering
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1

Hi,
Are raytraced shadows supported on Mac?
I have an iMac with a GeForce GTX 775M, I turned on “Generate Mesh Distance Fields” in the project settings and restarted the editor but when I visualise mesh distance fields, I don’t see any distance fields, the editor just displays the meshes normally but a bit brighter.
Also, when I turn off dynamic shadows and turn on RayTraced DistanceField Shadows, I don’t see any shadows.

2

Unfortunately RayTraced DistanceField Shadows aren’t supported on Mac OS X yet. It is on my schedule to work on after the release of UE4 4.11 but I can’t promise when it will be available on OS X.

3

No problem - edited to say ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ as support will be worked on - just not sure when it will be possible to get them working and enabled. Note that any such support will be limited to Metal - Mac OpenGL just doesn’t have the tools.

4

Ok thank you for your quick reply.

5

hi , will you be bypassing OpenGL all together with now Metal api ? I mean do you even need opengl any more ?

6

Metal is a completely separate API so OpenGL isn’t involved when UE4 is running on Metal.

We won’t be removing OpenGL support from UE4 so far as I am aware because so many platforms a devices still use it, though Metal will eventually become the default graphics API for UE4 on Apple platforms.

7

Thank you for information , quick question, in UE4, is metal automatically detected on ios ? or do i need to set a flag to have my game use metal api for rendering? thus hoping for better performance

Thanks again