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.
[UPDATE]: I’ve fixed it by disabling VTS for the normal atlas texture, just as you said. The engine limited the texture size to 4K instead of 8K, but I have to live with that. Don’t wanna kill the user’s VRAM. Thanks!
Hey,
how exactly did you force this none-virtual texture atlas? Changing the static switch in “M_HeadSynthesized” (is the parent of all real face mats) does affect the preview in there, so the artefacts disappear.
But when open some of the real face materials, always called “M_HeadSynthesized” who have the material above as parent, the artefacts are still there and there is no toggle option for it.
