Hello unreal community.
I’m new to in-engine stuff. My background is character art and it’s been years since I really worked with an engine besides checking textures and normal maps for characters.
I’ve an issue with a simple windmill I’ve modelled.
Do you see these stepped shadows on the side of the windmill?
Is this something unavoidable when not using normal maps? Because the goal with this asset was to test a mid-poly workflow where I don’t need to bake any normalmaps. Or would the simple solution be to increase the roundness?
I never did environmental assets, is it common sense to use a lot of polygons for big pieces like this windmill and then afterwards LOD the ■■■■ out of it?
It’s just a standard material provided within the Engine Content. This is also visible with a standard material with no inputs. But it’s more visible on a darker tone so I uploaded it with this wood material.
It’s a shadow bias issue. To get rid of the banding, you need to increase the shadow bias on your light. Disabling shadows on the mesh will make the banding go away completely, but then you lose shadows .
@
Did not change the rendering in the slightest, but non the less interesting, what does this do? How did you use this before?
@ midgunner66
You are totally right, I played around with every value I could find in the directional light, I could improve it a bit but I can never get rid of it completely. What did you mean with shadow “bias”? I could not find any bias value or mode.
This seems like a more complex problem than I thought. I guess I have to dig into Lightmap Baking to fully understand whats going on here.
Thanks nonetheless!
It kind of is a model issue - not enough geometry to have the tangent values accurate enough.
The setting I told you to toggle should improve that, but it’s usually for Reflections.
If there is anything at all similar to It for lighting an object/shadow baking, it would have to be at the import level.
Out of curiosity, do you have a texture plugged into the normal map, and are you sure it’s using the correct format?
You can even plug a 0,0,1 into it for testing. Though a proper normal map would be a better idea.
.5,.5,1 could do too in a pinch.
If you don’t have something plugged in, this could be the root cause.
If you have something plugged, then the other option is to derive the tangents from the normal map.
Sort of how you do for character skin…
But yea again the whole point of this would be that it should work without a normalmap plugged in.
I’m aiming for a heavily stylized world look and a fast workflow to create many assets fast without worrying to build highpolys for everything.
.5,.5,1 seems to look better until the lights gets into it.
Could you have something like rtx on or any other light settings that may need to be softer?
Like disabling cascade or increasing the number of cascades…
It may look better for the cascading effect but its plain wrong and the rest of the object is full of errors and weird shading.
I cant manage to tune this values to something that gets rid of the cascading effect.
But anyways we are talking about a dynamic directional light, it does not need be dynamic and if I set it to static or stationary these values do nothing visible in the editor.
I’m currently ready through the “Lighting the Environment” unreal engine documentation.
exactly. I am fully aware of this. “flat shade” means in engine that every edge gets cutted, vertices get duplicated and every vertex gets its own normal facing 90° ‘normal’ away form the face it belongs to.
If you smooth shade then nothing gets cutted, no extra vertices, and all normals get averaged to one angle and to look “smooth”. This windmill model is shading smooth in maya and blender and in the model inspector of unreal. I highly doubt that this is a model issue.
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