Maybe I have to file it as a bug report.
I’m sure though that someone has already run into a similar issue.
This is a custom water shader I have been hammering away at for about a week (with mathematical waves that I can read height from but that’s another story).
The last issue left on the shader itself is this weird shadowing artifact of some sort.
As you can see in the 2 screenshots, Unlit presents no problem. Lit, shows the artifact.
Reflection view shows no issues.
Lighting only has issues
Detail Lighting has issues
Separate Translucency has no issue
Separate translucency Alpha has black spots - though they are all over, no just in the zones that crop up this artifact.
The shader complexity buffer shows high complexity on the sunlight reflections (expected) because of translucency forward shading
Quad overdraw is terrible in the reflections as well - suppose that’s expected too
Anyway here are the screenshots.
Tessellation is limited and the Gerstner waves in question have maybe 1 m of height overall - which yes, I can reduce to lessen the error, but seems a bit unrealistic.
The material is probably not the culprit if not for the base settings of it.
This is a sample screenshot taken of a different material with just the waves+normal and a base color. You can see the artifact sill happening (although in the shadowed area only).
Making the material Opaque (gets rid of the transparency mask I need) but appears to solve the issue - so the problem is something to do with dynamic shadows and translucency shading.
Making it a masked material doesn’t seem to work (I cant use expressions to mask it? O_o)
Alpha-composite brings the issue back and does not mask the stencils
Note:
setting opacity to 1 (and therefore making the material not translucent) doesn’t really change anything. only changing the overall shading model has any effect.
Tips/solutions highly appreciated. (will post in answer-hub to verify if this is a bug)