# Why is my shadow not straight?

**URL:** <https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/why-is-my-shadow-not-straight/309363>\
**Category:** Rendering\
**Tags:** Shadows, unreal-engine, Lighting, Rendering, question\
**Created:** [March 5, 2015, 12:13pm UTC](https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/why-is-my-shadow-not-straight/309363 "2015-03-05T12:13:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Madmenyo](https://d3kjluh73b9h9o.cloudfront.net/original/4X/2/8/5/28502927f1d97ba1051b3b47ccfe17233bf41ef0.png) [@Madmenyo](https://forums.unrealengine.com/u/Madmenyo)\
**Post date:** [March 5, 2015, 12:13pm UTC](https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/why-is-my-shadow-not-straight/309363/1 "2015-03-05T12:13:03Z")

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I am still fiddling around with the basics of UE4 and I am stumbling on some shadow issues as you can see in the picture below.

![32420-shadows_1.png](https://d3kjluh73b9h9o.cloudfront.net/original/4X/2/7/6/2765c0745cdeccb58c6b2f19a88c446cf990e9de.png)

What could be causing this? The ceiling in the picture is actually the floor you start with and the wall is a simple cube with a material applied. I have not touched the drectional light I started with except for moving it out of the way.

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**Author:** ![anonymous\_user\_2ed5b4c7](https://d3kjluh73b9h9o.cloudfront.net/original/4X/2/8/5/28502927f1d97ba1051b3b47ccfe17233bf41ef0.png) [@anonymous\_user\_2ed5b4c7](https://forums.unrealengine.com/u/anonymous_user_2ed5b4c7)\
**Post date:** [March 5, 2015, 1:31pm UTC](https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/why-is-my-shadow-not-straight/309363/2 "2015-03-05T13:31:52Z")

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Hi!

I think light map have low resolution and very high sharpness. Make the edge of your shadow slightly blurry. In real world shadow not so sharp.

Read this docs

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**Author:** ![TorQueMoD](https://d1ap1mz92jnks1.cloudfront.net/user_avatar/forums.unrealengine.com/torquemod/32/710746_2.png) [@TorQueMoD](https://forums.unrealengine.com/u/TorQueMoD)\
**Post date:** [February 5, 2017, 1:37am UTC](https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/why-is-my-shadow-not-straight/309363/3 "2017-02-05T01:37:21Z")

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The answer is definitely the lightmap resolution but here’s a slide show that I made to demonstrate what is actually causing the problem and a solution:

![](https://d3kjluh73b9h9o.cloudfront.net/original/4X/9/4/3/9439966d3c18bc4bd9be95c40794d2cd08351040.gif)

Short answer is; If you build your wall out of 4 meshes instead of one, you won’t need a higher lightmap resolution. If you want to use a tiling texture like that on the wall, set it to use a “World Aligned Texture” and it will tile seamlessly across all 4 meshes. You should always build your levels out of several smaller static meshes instead of scaling meshes to fill the entire scene. As you scale a mesh up, it requires a higher lightmap resolution to give you the same visual fidelity.