I am building a cockpit with a lot of small, close up detail. I’m having a lot of issues with shadows looking wrong, not being exactly attached, and disappearing too soon as the camera moves back.
Is there anything I can I do to improve the rendering of small details?
Do you have a screenshot that can demonstrate what you’re seeing?
If you’re using dynamic shadows then that’s due to the Shadow Bias setting, it will affect how tight a shadow will be to the object that casts it, higher settings will make it appear as though an object is floating above the surface the the object is on (if it’s on a surface) while lower values can make the shadow closer but can introduce some shadow artifacts (a bunch of lines in the shadow)
I would try Contact Shadows which can render nice and clean shadows for things that are close to the camera: Contact Shadows | Unreal Engine Documentation
Here’s a screenshot:
The bottom row has some static meshes which don’t have shadows, but that’s ok to ignore. The top row are my Actors and you can see that the shadows are low res and sort of lumpy looking, and the shadow of the hexagonal nut behind the switches has already disappeared due to the distance. And this is a close up… at the standard distance that I’m aiming for, the shadows are disappearing. Note the lack of shadows on the left:
Another question is why the standard Text Render font appears to be emissive…
Contact Shadows certainly did somthing, and they are visible quite far away now, but disappear a bit closer to the camera, or dont smoothly go over to the previous default kind 
Still, a few more options to play with at least…
You could also try Dynamic Inset Shadowing, or bump up the AO power and radius in your Post Process. Or if you’re using a movable directional light, set the number of cascades higher. All of these are more performance heavy though
Sorry if obvious and I am no expert on this but have you tried tweaking cascade distances and that stuff?
I’m not so worried about expensive performance just yet, this is a space sim so rendering the cockpit with the best quality is my priority, there’s not gonna be much else to render 
I am trying to get UE to focus on the very short range as much as possible.
Lots of ideas to try, thanks guys.
