Why no shadows?

Development Rendering
, , ,
1

Screenshot 2024-03-10 193954
Screenshot 2024-03-10 193954759×943 269 KB

All that’s in this scene is a directional light, cube mesh, and plane mesh. I’ve changed none of their settings.

Notes:

  • lumen is disabled
  • engine scalability is set to epic
  • cast shadows is on the light
  • cast shadows is on the cube
  • light mobility is movable
  • view mode is set to lit
  • preview shadows indicator is on

Additional context:
I’m making a map for a Meta Quest game, so in the end, I will be using baked lighting + basic shadow maps, but I can’t see any shadows in editor. This is also making the baked lighting much harder to design without any kind of preview.

Thanks for any input.

2

Try setting the shadows to cascade in project settings.

3

Shadow Map Method is set to Shadow Maps and not editable.

The tooltip says “Automatically uses ‘Shadow Maps’ when Forward Shading is selected…” so this seems to be doing what’s expected?

Still no shadows in my scene. :frowning_face:

4

Did you build the level?

Does that white material on cube and floor have “uses static lighting checked”?

Do the meshes have a 2nd UV channel for light maps?

5

“Used with Static Lighting” is on, 2nd UV channel is present, and I am able to bake light maps, but that’s not my goal at the moment…

I really just want to see preview shadow maps as illustrated here:

UnbuiltShadows
UnbuiltShadows867×580 18 KB

It’s really hard to design baked lighting without these shadow previews, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why something so basic isn’t working.

6

Were you able to figure this out?

I ran into a similar issue after i moved my main shadow casting directional light into an Actor blueprint, all of a sudden baked shadows were gone from the entire project. even deleting and re-creating the light had no effect.

7

On Mobile, you need to decrease the distance field shadows from 20.000 to maybe 5000 and also the cascade shadows from 4 to 3. hope this helps.