Shadows just black, even with SkyLight?

Development Rendering
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1

Hello,

I have some Problems with the environment shadows. Even if I add a SkyLight to the Map the shadows are just black. You can’t the the character in the shadows and It just looks awful. I tried it with adding a SkyLight but it won’t change anything. So Whats the problem with my shadows?

16953-darkshadows.jpg
16953-darkshadows.jpg1206×887 173 KB

2

Changing it to movable solved it! It’s not perfect but a lot better. Thank you!

16954-shadows.png
16954-shadows.png1035×890 1.05 MB

3

have you tried build lighting, or just set the skylight to movable.

let me know if this solves

4

Hey KAEPS133 -

If you set the light back to Stationary and go into your World Settings >> Lightmass >> Lightmass Settings >> Environment Color and change it from Black to the color of your choice, usually based on your sky color which in most cases is blue-ish.

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

5

Directional light settings > reset all the shadows settings do the same in world shadows settings after set sky light to
stationary verify directional lighting settings > cascated shadow maps and reset settings, verify again world settings >
light softness and reset after build all…
sorry for bad english

6

You should really think carefully before changing the directional light since it can heavily impact performance.
The issue you have can be solved entirely and with more control with post process. You do it by:

  1. Add a ‘Post Process Volume’ to the scene
  2. Select it and turn on ‘Infinite Extent (Unbound)’
  3. Still inside the PPV find ‘Rendering Features → Global Illumination → Turn on Indirect Lighting Intensity’
  4. Set it to some value higher than 1 for lighter shadows. Once lighting is build you can change this a see immediate effect.
  5. Profit.

Sorry for necrobump, but it seemed unsolved :slight_smile:

1 Like
7

This didn’t fix the black shadow problem for me. It did add global illumination but there definitely seems to be an issue with some meshes just staying black once they are in hard shadows

8

If you’re like me then they were only black on one specific side of every object no matter what. I had to switch back to Shader Model 5 and DirectX 11 for it to get fixed. I think Shader Model 6 just doesn’t work properly yet in UE5.1, or at least not on my AMD Card.

9

change the source type in the skylight to SLS captured scene. this solved it for me.