This is my first UE5.5.1 test, I get dots anywhere while my custom character moves, why? Image attached
For now, my only solution is to change the shadow method (project settings) from “virtual shadow maps” to “shadow maps” wich causes nanite not to work, and already tried the directional light by editing shadow bias, contact shadow lenght (turn on and off) and many other options, but I do want to use nanite… so changing to shadow maps to fix it, is a problem
please help!
Increase the bounds of your character or whatever is casting that shadow slightly.
Increased to 10, then tro 1,000… no changes, same problem:
Also tried to make the capsule bigger… same problem.
Also tried this and no solution:
Also tried turning On/Off mega lights, no changes, I guess it is a Virtual Shadows issue in UE5.5.1, since my only way is turning Off Virtual shadow maps, but then no Nanite.
The reason I suggested that is bounds scaling is that this is a common issue with virtual shadow maps. It uses bounds to cheaply detect which cached pages to invalidate. If an object somehow has bounds that are too small (common on skinned meshes with static bounds) and moves outside them, it won’t know to invalidate those pages and the shadows will stick around like you see.
You can use the VSM debug viewmode to see that the page is not being invalidated as your character moves. You may also want to visualize the characters bounds to make sure your extension is working as expected. Is the character a nanite mesh or a regular mesh?
Yes… After testing the “Cached Page”, my character causes a redish area, meaning the invalidated issue of Virtual shadows you mention.
BUT, I can not make my actor bigger, it is the correct size, and if they know about this issue, why not adding an option for changing the shadow method of specific characters, no idea what to do then… imagine if my actor is an small dog or cat, cant make it bigger to pass this… and have a bulky hulk creature next to a kid just to fix shadows… 
Tried making it a bit bigger… same issue (meaning making it slightly bigger does not work), but the character already looks strange by scaling it, can’t scale it.
Also tried changing “Megalights Shadow Method” to Ray Tracing shadows… same issue
Help!
No need to make the actor bigger, just need to ensure it’s bounds are correct. I suspect you may be missing something with the bounds scale/extensions - like applying it to the wrong component or something.
There should be a debug view that shows bounds, so you can observe the size of them.
Doesn’t seem to be an issue with bounds, I shared pictures of me editing the bounds to make them bigger,
I searched online, and here it is another person with the same issue and a regular size character, not small:
As you can see this character is not tinny, it is a regular human, leaving similar shadow traces or dots, but larger as he moves, pretty much the same issue and he respondend that this is a Virtual Shadow Issue in UE5, wich has not been solved by the Epic Team (at the Q/A responses)
same issue I have, same solution I found, wich leaves me without Nanite…
It has nothing to do with the size of the character. It has to do with the size of the bounding box. Are you using a nanite mesh character or a regular mesh character?
Regular rigged character, and as I showed you I already tried to increase the bounding box in 2 different ways, making it up to 3 times the size of the character
It could also be this:
I found a solution that works for this. For me my player has a dynamic cape with is in a rigid body sim.
the cape fly’s out of the bounds and leaves little shadow artifacts on the terrain.
Firstly it does seem to be the bounds of the skeletal mesh. on the skeletal mesh actor itself I increased the size of the bounds
So i increased the bounds by ~ +100
this alone doesn’t solve the issue because unreal is still using the original bounds of the character.
In the character BP on the mesh if you search bounds you will find a few Optimization settings.
One is the Use Bounds from Leader Pose Component this is if your character is comprised of multiple SKMs it will use the bounds of the leader SKM and ignore children.
The other two are;
Component Use Fixed Skel Bounds - this seems to fix the issue if you have defined your bounds on the skm. This seems to have solved all my issues.
Consider All Bodies for Bounds - this seems to take the bounds of your physics bodies into account to calculate your bounds. (In my testing this worked 98% of the time but i could still cause shadow marks with it.
I found a fix, but not sure if it will work for everyone:
Instead of changing the positive and negative bounds of the character’s “mesh” (wich had no impact for me), you should increase the “bounds scale” from the mesh inside the character BP (no their capsule… also didn’t work), just select the “character skeletal mesh” in the character BP and search in the “details” panel for “Bounds Scale” and increase it.
In my case, increasing “bounds scale” from 1 to 1.8 solves the problem.
For now, it has solved my problem, but… I don’t know if this will cause other problems.
