Dynamic shadows artifacts

[spacegojira]

Yea we've run into this issue at our studio as well. Pretty frustrating and sometimes hard to hide.

I agree, and it's impossible to always hide it with meshes or other "tricks".

But what's even more frustrating is how Epic is ignoring the problem for two years now and tries to sweep it under the rug, likely in hope someone from the community will do the work for them to fix it..

[IOchair]

I just tried the dev-rendering branch. After RTX ON, this bug no longer needs to be fixed(for my goal).

[jonimake]

I just tried the dev-rendering branch. After RTX ON, this bug no longer needs to be fixed(for my goal).

The whole issue is with _shadow mapping_ not with ray tracing. Two completely separate things.

[Chosker]

I just tried the dev-rendering branch. After RTX ON, this bug no longer needs to be fixed(for my goal).

with that line of thought we'll end up confirming that Epic is still just hiding this issue under the rug until the technology catches up, which is sad

[spacegojira]

with that line of thought we'll end up confirming that Epic is still just hiding this issue under the rug until the technology catches up, which is sad

If you go through the discussion here you can see that it's not a problem about technology, but about how Epic is rendering shadows in Unreal Engine (as other engines do not have this problem). I agree on the first part though..

[Fiasco Games]

c'mon epic this is a **** problem, 2 years and 26 pages of threads ignored? what the hell are you doing

[IronicParadox]

c'mon epic this is a **** problem, 2 years and 26 pages of threads ignored? what the hell are you doing

It's not an easy fix. Typically, in dynamic scenes, a lot of render time is eaten up by shadows. Anything they do to alleviate the artifacting is going to increase that portion of the frame time.

[spacegojira]

It's not an easy fix. Typically, in dynamic scenes, a lot of render time is eaten up by shadows. Anything they do to alleviate the artifacting is going to increase that portion of the frame time.

That sounds like a bad excuse to me, considering that other engines don't have this problem and still don't suffer from framerate losses when it comes to smooth dynamic shadows without artifacts.

[Fiasco Games]

look at the second phtoo of the unity docs, unity have normal bias and other option to solve this issue, why ue don't?

[Fiasco Games]

BUMP this discussion is too important to be ignored by epic for 2 years and after thirty thousand and more visits

[IronicParadox]

That sounds like a bad excuse to me, considering that other engines don't have this problem and still don't suffer from framerate losses when it comes to smooth dynamic shadows without artifacts.

It's not and every engine is different. Unreal has an insane amount of things tied to the shadow system. To truly fix the problem, it would likely take a serious amount of low level recoding. Using unity, as a comparison, is an apple vs an orange. Both are fruits, but both are very different from each other.

If this were a simple fix, they would have done it years ago...

[spacegojira]

It's not and every engine is different. Unreal has an insane amount of things tied to the shadow system. To truly fix the problem, it would likely take a serious amount of low level recoding. Using unity, as a comparison, is an apple vs an orange. Both are fruits, but both are very different from each other.

If this were a simple fix, they would have done it years ago...

No one here said it's going to be an easy fix, that isn't even the point. It's about Epic ignoring this discussion for over 2 years now and not even talking about if they intent to fix it or if we just have to "deal with it".

With all the money Epic made through Fortnite, they could easily hire a few experts to work on this and the countless other engine problems. Or for example hire a few UI / UX experts to make the launcher and the marketplace better. But do you see them doing that?

It doesn't matter how long it would take to fix it, but they are not even acknowledging the problem exists.

[Fiasco Games]

i have to go to unity for this problem, sorry EPIC

[IronicParadox]

It doesn't matter how long it would take to fix it, but they are not even acknowledging the problem exists.

I'm pretty sure they have acknowledged it as an issue, but haven't given an ETA on a fix. I know they have PCSS on the roadmap, but it seems like it apparently didn't make it into 4.22.

[II_ADN_II]

Personally, I think this is a problem that has nothing to do with RTX or PCSS. I know that unreal had "hided" this kind of probolems before, implementing more expensive techniques to replace the old ones , or simply set the feature to "experimental" and abandoned it after launch.

This could not be a trivial problem to solve in the actual render pipeline, but its not a minor problem either. Dynamic shadows in the engine lack of several basic features. They were a "on the go" implementation since the begining(features as proxy shadows or normal based bias should have been there since day 1).

This kind of things happen on programming all the time, simple things hardcoded in stone (as the gravity only Z axis) are real bad design decisions, and not everyone has the resources to "fix" all this anoying little things, that in the end causes the everyday work with unreal a real pain.

IMO epic should be focusing more on usability, and assure that the existing features are robust enough for a multipurpose engine such as UE4 has become.