Hey there! I am trying to use the MetaHumans from the official City Sample Crowds asset inside the default Third Person Template (Unreal Engine 5.3). When prompted, I enabled all project settings / plugins required for these assets. Often, all characters look perfectly fine, but sometimes a new random character (random options = True in BP_CrowdCharacter) has weird, banded shadow artifacts on their face:
Unfortunately, I could not detect any pattern or a specific face or type of character for which this happens. Does someone have an idea on what could cause this problem? It is sometimes resolved by restarting the editor or using a new random configuration, but quite annoying since I want to randomly spawn pedestrians. Thanks in advance for any help!
I tried disabling “cast shadows” in the blueprint and it didn’t resolve the issue unfortunetly. I’m not raytracing shadows either…so not sure what gives here. It seems like some sort of weird indirect lighting issue as when they are directly lit by other light sources they look fine. I think the same issue is interfering with the hair too. Two images below are after disabling “cast shadows” in the blueprint.
Indirect lighting (i.e in shady part of my outdoor scene)
I managed to fix it by forcing a non-VT atlas, but it’s a suboptimal solution - such an atlas would have a pretty huge memory footprint if it was to be of decent quality.
