State and future of PCSS (shadows)

Development Rendering
1

The RTX Raytracing is very cool, but that’s out of question for games in the next few years (at least as a full solution for lighting).

After a few years something was done with the “blocky” shadows (Dynamic shadows artifacts - Feedback & Requests - Epic Developer Community Forums), but still doesn’t seem to be fully solved.

So what about PCSS? It’s been in the engine for a long time now but it still doesn’t seem to be “out of beta”. If you ignore the obvious issues, it actually looks and works pretty good. But those issues still make it unusable. Kalle Hamalainen made some fixes and optimizations ( + Percentage closer filtering improvements. - Frame Comparison - Screenshot Comparison made easy) but that seems to be ignored by Epic.

Is there any info about this from Epic? Maybe in one of the video streams or other channels?

It starts to feel like Unreal Engine is getting neglected for general/indie game development. There is some stuff done because of Fortnight (which usually doesn’t mean many medium/higher end features) and than it seems to be all for Visualization and “Hollywood”.

:frowning:

2

Just use my changes integrated locally. Its only shader modification so you don’t even need source code version of the engine.

3

Doh, I didn’t notice that. Thanks for the info.

4

Sorry to barge into this thread, but this is the first time I’ve heard of this. Where can I find more information? I tried to search this forum but came up with nothing?

Is this a replacement for the built-in contact shadows? I’ve never found them to work very well. Can this be used in forward shaded, stereo instanced VR?

5

You can find the file to modify here -> C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_4.24\Engine\Shaders\Private (or whatever your custom path is).

It’s not a replacement of the contact shadows. It’s “only” a different method to compute/filter the shadow maps.
Not sure about forward shading or VR.