Stationary point light and movable sphere. the sphere casts a dynamic shadow from the point. But as soon as I move away, the shadow first brightens, then disappears. How do I make a dynamic shadow visible even at a long distance? Even if it is expensive in terms of performance
Hello Jack_Tager_DEV,
I think I understand what the problems is. So to explain what happens: Point Light dynamic shadows are cascaded by default, because dynamic point lights, don’t tend to scale nicely in terms of performance (a point light, is more or less equal to 6 spot lights). Cascaded shadow maps (CSM) are there to help retain performance, by lowering the shadow resolution of a light (referring to point and spot lights here) according to its distance to the camera, and in fact you don’t need the full resolution shadow at all distances. And at some distance the shadows of those lights (again referring to point and spot lights) get culled, simply to retain performance.
If you really need those shadows, you can take a look into Distance Field Shadows ( Mesh Distance Fields | Unreal Engine Documentation, Distance Field Soft Shadows | Unreal Engine Documentation ). It requires some setup (meshes and lights), but most of it should be handled by the engine itself, you need to activate Distance Field Shadowing for your lights though. And you have to take your target platform into consideration, as DFS requires SM5.
Hope that helps. Just let me know if I was too unclear, or you simply have some questions.
Regards,
Vecherka.
I understand that is the work of the cascade shadow maps. I am not particularly interested in performance, since the project is for cinematics. I know how to use distance field technology, but as far as I understand stationary light sources do not allow the calculation of the shadow through DFS. another strange thing is that a moving light source keeps a dynamic shadow at a longer distance. Thank you for your response)