Unreal 5.5.4 to 5.6.1 - fixing horribly worse shadows?

Development Rendering
,
1

I’m not even sure where to begin with this. I wasn’t expecting any graphics visuals to be this drastic, considering my project was converting from right at the end of 5.5.

Shadows from direct sun are yielding blurry low quality shadows that just look horrible (ARPG overhead view.) It looks bad enough when zoomed in, but even worse when zooming the camera out to normal gameplay distance.

Shadows from light sources are yielding shadows with 0 edge softing at all (it’s literally hard edges of polygons.)

Before I spend hours spinning my wheels, can anyone tell me what the common problems are from upgrading 5.5 to 5.6, and what to tweak? Or a link? I couldn’t find hardly anything on 5.6 and problems with shadows.

2

im not aware of common problems. i think it’s reasonable that you spend some time doing some research in order to get a good answer.

can you put some images of your issues and what you expect?

also detail your set-up.

does it happens on new projects in 5.6?

keep in mind that rendering settings are kept when upgrading versions and sometimes that’s not the optimal. chris murphy mentioned it on a new video called “preempting aaa issues “ or something like that.

what platform, what techs are you using? aa mode, nanite, shadow mode, lighting mode, shader model, etc. those could help. also if you have some cvars for shadow settings it might help sharing those too.

3

i think it’s reasonable that you spend some time doing some research in order to get a good answer.

You’re under no obligation to answer the post btw. I’m specifically asking anyone who has converted their projects from 5.5 to 5.6, and had similar issues.

–

I’ve found what I believe is part of the problem by testing the TopDown demo in 5.6. Disabling nanite causes the virtual shadow maps to degrade drastically.

image
image378×236 46.1 KB

This did not happen in 5.5 when nanite was disabled. Unless I’m missing some other setting, which can be changed to make it look like it did in 5.5.

I’m also not against re-enabling the nanite component… however I find the system useless for a top down isometric game. I want every model to have exactly the same polygons 100% of the time. No LODs. No nanite meshes. Nanite meshes actually cause more problems because of the scaling, not to mention how terrible they are to modify and deal with, plus memory.

I could certainly enable nanite, and then never use nanite meshes. But would this cause any overhead or problems in other ways? Especially since I don’t need it (other than shadow maps?)

edit:

Also for reference - most of my sun direct light settings are defaults from 5.5. And I don’t even believe I’ve ever changed anything else with shadows. It’s mostly 5.4/5.5 default graphics settings. I would have to assume there’s bound to be other ppl out there that had this problem when converting.

4

i know. don’t take my words personally. it’s just regular netiquette, it’s usually expected that someone does a minimum of homework before posting a question, and adds enough context to it. it usually is necessary to solve an issue, otherwise just to be respectful of others’ time.

it’s not personal, i’m just trying to help you. if someone knows exactly the answer, but i thought it’d be kind to try to help you in the meanwhile, while boosting visibility of your post. so your message made me feel like you didn’t wanted my help, which makes me sad.

i have. but i haven’t had those issues. that’s why i needed more context to help you.

yes that’s a reasonable assumption. in my case, i’ve been following the development of ue5.6 and i haven’t noticed that issue in my projects nor in the people’s feedback. not saying it’s not there, but i haven’t encountered it. and people were very vocal about every detail.

  1. have you checked here to see if someone reported it already? https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/unreal-engine-5-6-released/
  2. have you checked the release notes by tina?, it has a few known issues.
  3. there’s also the bug tracker https://issues.unrealengine.com/

if someone had the same problem, then it’s more than likely you’ll find it on any of those .

  1. have you tried using the vsm visualization mode and other debug tools to figure out what is the difference?
  2. have you tried enabling the “console vars” plugin and panel to watch which variables are changing when you enable and disable nanite?
  3. have you tried other shadow methods? like cascaded shadows?
  4. have you tried other antialiasing methods?
  5. have you made sure it’s not an issue with the performance settings ? (the quality levels)

virtual shadow maps were made to work/improve with nanite afaik. nanite on vsm is much more performant than regular objects+vsm (afaik), so no wonder the quality degrades. iirc there are some cvars to adjust vsm quality. that might help.

it’s possible a previous setting is affecting. unfortunately i don’t know which, i would have to inspect your project and i don’t think i know enough about vsm settings. but i do encourage you to isolate the settings, and play with them to see them. there’s the “abtest” command which can be helpful.

that’s why i asked if it happens with a sample project. you said you tested with the demo top down so i assume that’s a project from epic. so maybe it’s how the shadows work on 5.6, so yes, maybe a 5.6 issue.

by the way i work i could either just conclude that it’s a 5.6 issue, in which case the course of action would be to submit a bug, and rollback to 5.5. or try to find a way to make it work the way you want. i’m inclined towards the latter. that’s what my posts are trying to help with.

tangential but on that note. on a top-down iso maybe even 3d meshes are too much. “Hades” bakes the meshes to videos, the shadows are baked too. though it’s a ton of extra work. There’s a great talk from them, it’s also unrelated to this, but i recommend it, since it might inspire you, and it’s also very good.

Ue has a tool to make a spritesheet from a 3d mesh.

in theory it might, but there’s only one way to know. test it. if it has a noticeably meaningful overhead, then it does, otherway it has no noticeably meaningful overhead.

5

You’re lecturing me to do research in my own post, but if you just did a search on those links for “virtual shadow maps” you would see theres 0 results that are relevant, and could have saved yourself from typing all of that :slight_smile:

The demo mentioned is the ones that come with UE (in just about every version.) It’s pretty common that most people look at the UE demo projects in each major version. And the video doesn’t seem relevant at all.

I’m not looking for general advice on shadow maps or how to do my art style… I’m trying to figure out why 5.5→5.6 does not work the same for virtual shadow maps. It looked fine in 5.5 with nanite disabled. Reverting back to an old version is a cop-out way for a developer to deal with a new version. Hence, the entire reason I created this post.

I appreciate your effort, but it just doesn’t seem relevant to this issue.

I’ll either:

A> Deal with nanite being enabled - and hope there’s no problems down the road

B> Report it as a bug, or continue to monitor the reports

Thank you