I’m pretty new to lighting in UE5, just noticed in my project I keep getting strange square looking jagged edges were surfaces of meshes curve. They seem good from far away but the closer I get the more noticeable they are.
Does anyone know what is causing them and how I can fix them, or if it has been asked already could someone point me to a link to a solution?
Thanks.
Using higher poly meshes would definitely help. It may not be the total solution.
I tried subdividing the sphere 2 times, this was the result, does seem better but seem like the pattern of the shadow is broken up on each polygon in a strange way still.
How about this one?
sphere.fbx (197.0 KB)
Still the same on that sphere thanks by the way CockworkOcean I appreciate taking some time to troubleshoot this. oh I should mention I’m on a geforce 2080 ti RTX card with lumen, for my GI and Ray Tracing for my reflections. and a Rect Light listing a scene, a sky light with an HDRI at a low setting, and some exponent fog, not sure if any of those would cause an issue like this.
Here’s the result with your sphere model
Could be the recht light, especially if you tweaked some settings. Can you try replacing it with a point light?
Here is the Spheres with a point light Top one is the low rez big one is your mesh, and the bottom one is a subdivide mesh of the low rez, still getting those shadow artifacts.
Hard to say. I’d break it down. Make a blank empty level and just put a sphere and light in there, and build up from that.
I get this
Dang, so I tried making a brand new project made an empty level imported your sphere and put a point light in the scene, I was hoping it was just my other project, I wonder if my video card drivers are messed up. Also noticed my windows needs to install an update not sure if that would effect unreal though.
Here was the result
I’m assuming the material is simple.
Windows update - no diffrence.
GPU drivers maybe. Two things to try and ‘game ready’ and ‘studio’ ( stable ) versions.
Is this a virgin project? ( no tweaked params )
yeah was a new project with a blank level just the sphere and the light, the material had a vector parameter for the color, and that was it.
I’m running out of options here 
I don’t see anything about your card having a problem.
Are you using DX12 in the project ( can’t recall the default ).
Its directX 12, I think when I enabled ray tracing it has to switch it to DX12 to work. I’m pretty stumped on it just updated my video card drivers still the same results. Thanks for taking the time to look at the issue ClockworkOcean, I’ll keep trying to find a solution for it, maybe I will have to reinstall the engine or something.
I discovered something not sure why it is doing it, but when I turn off cast shadows the artifacts seem to go away, but seems like I would need to cast shadows with lights, I’m still pretty confused about this.
Yeah, you definitely need shadows
I might come back with something useful in a while…
Thanks OclockworkOcean, I will keep clicking on things maybe I will get lucky 
I made some progress, I’m still am not sure why the strange shadow artifacts happen, but after discovering that turning off cast shadows improved it some what, I started playing around with other settings, Cast Ray Traced Shadows is off by default, I enabled it, it improved quite a bit, but I still see some square artifact on the terminator of the shadow on the lower rez sphere. On more dense meshes the Terminator seems to be smooth. Now I am wonder if I have to make all my curved surfaces on my models more dense in order to have better shadows. Still not sure why those strange artifacts were accruing, I’ll need to keep testing things out.
If anyone has any idea how or why this happens I would sure like to know.
Oh I think that thing I thought was an artifact on the low rez mesh was just the shape of the polygon rotating the sphere there is an angle that it go’s away so I think the issue is solved, it just going to require more geometry to smooth out the surface.
@ClockworkOcean thanks again for helping me out 
Yes, well done, I was going to say that. The normals are per vertex, and a low res mesh like that, just doesn’t have enough
I don’t know if you were using the new ‘virtual shadow maps’ in UE5, but if you were, that may of been the problem. Changing it to simple ‘shadow maps’ in your project settings can help make this problem go away. At least when it comes to a simple sphere like that.
