Seeking photoreal renders:
Does UE have a mode to render real penumbras? Penumbras vary in sharpness with distance from the shadow casting object., based on how collimated the light is. I see a lot of sharp, raytraced shadows and soft shadow maps, but not so much photoreal penumbras.
lor
Here I am showing PBR raytraced area (rect) light shadows with properly behaving penumbra (bottom image). The shadow penumbra is focused where the shadow begins (at the casting object) and widens (defocuses, blurs, softens) with distance from the shadow casting object. The best I’ve been able to achieve in UE is in the UEarealight image (top image). The penumbra does not sharpen at the shadow-casting object and therefore makes it appear to be floating rather than in contact with the ground, which it is.
Is there a way to force UE to generate more accurate penumbras?
lor
what about raytraced shadows?
or distance field shadows?
In your light object, you can use ray-traced lighting/shadowing. However, if you don’t have real-time RT capable GPU, you can utilise Distance Field shadows.
If you’re going for DF shadows, you had to enable DF support in Project Settings first and restart the engine.
Ray traced shadows are always perfectly sharp, it seems, which is not photoreal. DF shadows are not for close up detail, are they? Am I missing something here?. Also, when I enable distance field shadows on the light, UE freezes. The lighting will not build.
OK, I managed to get distance fields and distance field shadows enabled with the use of this great tutorial Ray Traced Distance Field Shadows | Tips & Tricks | Unreal Engine - YouTube
I understand distance fields better now. This does add some limited functionality permitting almost realistic penumbra shadows, within limits. It’s a big improvement so thanks [USER=“399266”]The Hoodie Guy[/USER] for pointing me in the right direction. I can work with this.