Why do I have hard edges/shadows on my model?

[frostic]

@IronicParadox;694653

Like I said, it’s something you’re doing wrong because it’s working just fine for me…

looks like he is not adding hard edges to the edges to me. This is why he is having these shading issues. i had the same frustration till someone on these forums told me how to add hard edges BEFORE unwraping uvs and rendering texture maps etc etc.

[IronicParadox]

@Chosker;697525

@IronicParadox in your last shot the mesh is placed in a level, right? what kind of light does it have? try with a dominant directional light (movable) with 3 cascades. or maybe post the mesh and we can find what it is that makes it break

I’m with Radilex_ here, I get the problem with meshes that don’t even have a normalmap (like the default sphere), and also with Landscapes (where of course you can’t make a high-poly bake)

That’s with it in fully dynamic lighting…

If you’re getting problems like that, without a normal map, it definitely sounds like a driver/video card issue. Try checking your nvidia or ati control panel settings. Make sure everything is on max quality, etc etc.

[Chosker]

@IronicParadox;697973

If you’re getting problems like that without a normal map, it definitely sounds like a driver/video card issue. Try checking your nvidia or ati control panel settings. Make sure everything is on max performance, etc etc.

everyone in my team haves it and we have quite veriety of rigs, so it’s definitely not a problem about my PC

can you post a screenshot of the same setup posted above by Raildex_ ? just the default sphere with a constant 1.0 in the BaseColor

[IronicParadox]

Here’s what it looks like on my screen:

[IronicParadox]

Oh now that I’ve played around with the shadow settings some, I can reproduce the faceted look on the model… I’ve been using medium for shadows, but when I put it to high or epic, it starts to show the faceting and if I put it to cinematic, it makes the problem much more visible.

EDIT: r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades seems to be the culprit

[Raildex]

^Indeed. The Facetting disappears when I have 0 MaxCascades

[IronicParadox]

Play around with the light’s shadow biasing. It can smooth it out some. Just make sure not to overdo it.

[Chosker]

if you put 0 max cascades, don’t you basically get rid of all shadows?

[IronicParadox]

Yeah, that’s definitely a problem. Other than that, there isn’t much you can do about it other than try to avoid models that are already pretty faceted. One easy way to make it not so visible is to put on a real material/texture. Using plain shaders makes it stand out 1000000x worse than with something that has some texture to it. Just even switching from the plain white to a gravel texture will make it almost completely disappear.

You have to cut corners somewhere, but I guess CSMs are it. Small price to pay for a massive boost in overall scene quality.

[Chosker]

here’s the thing, I get the same issue with textured characters and textured landscapes. applying a proper use case material/texture makes it less evident, but still very evident in my cases

on a different note, other engines including UE3 use CSM and don’t have this problem so blaming it on the technique wouldn’t be right

[IronicParadox]

Oh it’s definitely CSM, I tested it thoroughly. Turn it off, the faceting goes away, turn it on and it comes back. I made sure to leave all other “variables” constant; while checking it out.

[Grafix]

And what´s the solution for it?

[TheArtGuy]

@Grafix

And what´s the solution for it?

Select the Directional Light, increase “Dynamic Shadow Distance MovableLight” from the default 20,000 to an higher value like 80,000 then play with the other cascade settings to get it to your liking.

[christianstamati]

Hi,
I tried to bake a rounded surface in unreal and i’m getting facetting artifact (shadow terminator problem).

Link: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/956758/view.html

Dose anybody know how to fix it?