sorry if this has been asked before, but I´m fairly new to UE4 and run into a problem with an stationary light. The static shadows look fine, but my character shadow disappears if I turn to walk in another direction (using the third person template with Mixamo Adam character). In some angles the shadow is there, but when the character rotes, the shadow disappears.
Please have a look at the attached image. The guy on the left is he Adam-NPC, just inserted from the content browser (animated, idle) . The one on the right is my player character. He´s lost his shadow :-/ .
Bumping this one. Has anybody also got problems with the shadows when using stationary lights? Tried changing bias and other mentioned settings but the problem is still there.
Can anybody please do a quick setup (third person template, standard character or one from Mixamo. Stationary point light anywhere in the map. )and verify that this is a bug. The character shadow should disappear when the character rotates.
no, full-dynamic lights work without any issues. The strange thing is that the static objects and the “npc” render perfectly well with stationary lights, just the player-character has these problems :-/ .
It looks a bit like “z-fighting”, if you know what I mean. Shadow flickers sometimes or doesn´t appear at all.
@ Klaus : No. I used the standard third person template and deactivated the directional “sunlight”. No other lights were activated, just the stationary point light which causes the shadow problem. I used the standard third person “blueman” character or the Mixamo Adam. Can you verify this issue? It´s driving me nuts :-/ .
In terms of baked lighting, a stationary light is actually “static”. It uses partial light baking.
Just hover over the buttons in the actor details panel and see in the tooltip what the differences are.
Change the light to “movable”, even if you dont have any intention of moviong it and the problem should be gone.
But compare FPS values as dynamic light is more resource consumptive.
Thanks Klaus for your answer. Yes, stationary lights are baked, but they are also usable for dynamic objects. Of course I could just use dynamic lights, but since this “hybrid” solution is available, I would prefer it to work the way it should. GI works only with baked lighting i.e. stationary lights or static (ignoring LPV) as far as I know.
I just would like to know if I have to alter something with my setup or is it a bug?
I wasn’t able to read the whole thread, but the usual thing to check in this situation is that the bounds of the skeletal mesh are reasonable. A movable object affected by a Stationary light is going to create a per-object shadow, which is mapped based on the bounds of the object. Check it out with Show->Advanced->Bounds.
Also, if the light source goes inside the object, bad things can happen and the shadow can pop out, maybe that is it?
Thanks for you reply. I will certainly check out the bounds of the character, but I don´t think that that is the problem. I tested my simple level with the standard UE4-third person template “blueman” and with Mixamos characters and I get the same error with both.
The light source is not placed inside any mesh, just a standard “bulb” stationary point light hanging in space. This “z-fighting” shadow-flickering/disappearing only happens to the player characters. If I just drop “Adam” into the scene and he plays his idle animation, everything is fine.
When the character faces the light source or has it back to it, the shadow is more or less visible. As soon as I turn the character, the shadow disappears. Seems to me very buggy, but I find it very strange that nobody else has reported this?!
Guys, i’m slowly going insane. I just set up the same scenario ( stationäre point light and mixamos Charakter), but this time I used the first Person template.
It works. The shadow appears and the whole scene looks great . very strange … Something in the third Person template ruins my sdtationary Charakter shadows…
. very strange … Something in the third Person template ruins my sdtationary Charakter shadows…