Stationary lights and static shadows

Development Rendering
1

Same problem

2

Hi,

so, i have a scene which i am using for a VR project. It contains some meshes, a landscape and foliage.
I cant go full dynamic lighting since this kills the framerate completely. I cant go full static lighting since the foliage wont work correctly with it (all trees i got are much too dark then).
So stationary lights for the rescue, to have dynamic lights where needed. The problem is, that for some meshes no static shadows are generated.
The meshes are set to static, have “dynamic shadows” set to off and “static shadows” set to on.

Any idea? I already played around with various settings for days but couldnt find anything that works.

Cheers,

3

Hey ,

Stationary lights, especially Direcitonal Stationary Lights, are a special breed that have the benefit of using both static and dynamic lighting depending on the actor’s set mobility.

With that out of the way, stationary direcitonal lights are neither fully dynamic or fully static. What I mean by that is that is that since they use Cascaded Shadow Maps for their set dynamic shadow casting distance if you disable the dynamic lighting part of the light this does not automatically make it only a statically lit actor. The dynamic shadow casting distance will light everything within it’s set distance dynamically. If an actor is set to use only static lighting it will not have any shadow casting until it is outside of the dynamic distance range. In case that was too confusing or I didn’t explain it in the clearest form here is an example from a simple scene I set up.

Here is the setup for the Actors in this scene:

  • Stationary Directional Light
  • Dynamic Shadow Distance Stationary Light: 1000
  • Left Pillar
  • Default Settings
  • Middle Pillar
  • Dynamic Shadow disabled
  • Right Pillar
  • Mobility set to Movable

I set a low lightmap resolution of 32 for the Floor so that it is easier to see the transition from the higher quality dynamic shadowing to the low resolution bake of the lightmap.

99317-stationarydirectionalshadows.gif

I hope this helps.

Tim

1 Like
4

what settings are needed to replicate this on UE5?