Hey guys,
here’s my sytuation:
As far as I know, there’s no light channels here in UE4, I’m looking for the best possible option to:
1.Cast shadows on my turrets
3.Cast shadows by my turrets
4.Make everything as cheap as possible
I prefer lightmap ofk, but after enable Cast Dynamic Shadows option, mixed shadows are too dark. With Static Shadows buildings (in the middle) shadows are too dark when the’re overlaping eachother.
Mobile is my target platform.
Any advices from more experienced developers?
The 4.11 preview now has lighting channels which might be worth looking at, it states in the tool tip “These channels only apply to opaque materials, direct lighting, and dynamic lighting and shadowing.”. I have no idea if these channels work with mobile however.
Reading up on mobile lighting here https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Platforms/Mobile/Lighting/index it seems the modulated shadowing that you are getting is intended and at the moment there isn’t a way around it without it being too expensive to use on mobile platforms. If you check out Dawn Of Titans game play, which is a pretty big budget mobile game, their shadowing does the same thing. Real time shadows on mobile is a mine field, I worked on a project in Unity recently which required real time shadows, the results were never pretty and we could only target really high end devices. If it were me I would move the buildings and angle the light so that the baked shadows and modulated shadows rarely overlap, I would also consider having blob shadows for the turrets on lower spec hardware.
Actually, thinking about things that you could do, if your levels are curated and not procedurally generated you could position a shadow volume where your buildings cast shadows and have that volume trigger an event for any actor on entering/exiting to darken/lighten their material as if receiving shadows, it could even fade based on how much of them is inside the volume. You could also potentially mask this somehow based on which bits are inside and out so it looks like the shadow is cast but it’s really just a neat cheat. No idea how expensive any of that is on mobile though without doing in depth tests.
But you could use that to have the buildings cast shadows on movable actors such as turrets etc. but still have them as static and baking lighting. If light channels work on mobile you could then have a light for static and a light for dynamic then tone the modulated shadows on the movable channel down so it blends a little nicer.
