Hi-res shadows in matinee

Hi everyone!

I’m struggling to have hi-res shadows in Matinee renderings: I pump up Shadow.MinResolution and Shadow.MaxResolution via console commands and it works fine in viewport, but when i render the Matinee sequence I’ve only low res shadows.

Any suggestions?

-peace-

Budello

Hello,

Would you mind providing a screenshot of what you are looking at to help me visualize your issue a bit better?

Aside from that, I do know of a few good ways to increase your shadows resolution, but some are dependent on what type of lights you have in your scene as well as the settings within each light component.

One way to increase your shadow resolution is to increase the resolution of the objects that are receiving the shadows i.e. static meshes or BSPs.

Another way to sharpen your shadows would be to increase your “Shadow Bias” and “Shadow Filter Sharpen” within your light components. Shadow bias controls how much of your object will receive a shadow and you can sharpen this value with the “Shadow Filer Sharpen” setting.

Here is an another AnswerHub post similar to what you were requesting where a user wanted increased shadow quality.

AnswerHub Post:

I hope this gets you on your way to cleaning up your shadows, and let us know if you need help with anything else.

Hi Andrew,
thanks for the answer! Right now I can’t show you any screenshot cause I don’t have the project with me, I’ll try to explain it better and then I’ll give you the screenshots, when I’m back in the office:
I’ve full realtime lighting in my scene, cause I’m producing some demo video with Matinee and so I’m not that concerned about performance. I render them and then post-produce with after effects. The problem is that in viewport shadow are sharp and beautiful, after pumping up shadow resolution and adjusting cascade settings.
When I render, shadows resolution is extremely low in game window: maybe I should setup Engine.ini to have 4096 res shadows…

Hope this help to clarify my problem.

-peace-

Budello

Let the images do the talking:

This is an explanation that works better than word…

-peace-

Budello

Hello,

So there are a few reasons why your shadows could be losing quality while in your matinee. I set up a scene with a Directional light set to Stationary, a Skylight set to Stationary, and an object with high resolution shadows. This object is static, but I set it to Moveable to get the high quality shadows cast from the Stationary Directional Light in my scene.

When triggering the matinee I am not seeing the same effect you are experiencing, but this change could be somewhere in your light settings and not your shadows. Try setting up your scene with these values and getting rid of your edited shadow resolution as well.

Directional Light

  • Intensity 10.0

  • Stationary

  • Dynamic Shadows Enabled

Skylight

  • Intensity 1.0

  • Stationary

Static Mesh

  • Moveable

  • Dynamic Shadows Enabled

With these settings in mind there is some documentation about Matinee itself that also explains you might experience a loss of detail.

‘In your game, you may have many in-game cinematic sequences, but lighting on the characters using the light environments set up may look a bit basic and it may be difficult to really show off the models nicely. In this case, you can use custom lighting channels (sometimes a separate lighting channel for separate characters to control the amount of lights per character), and custom placed dynamic lights to light the characters during close-up shots.’

Unless you want to share your project, this is as much as I can provide you with at this time about how to improve your matinee and shadows.

I hope this was helpful!

.

Actually, I’ve managed to solve the problem with the help of our programmer.
To have hi-res shadows in Matinee rendering, you should setup your level blueprint in this way:

In this way, when you click matinee “Create a Movie”, game engine will automatically switch to hi-res shadows.
Actually, you can put a lot of different commands in here, to have a better image quality.

Thanks Andrew, you didn’t solve my problem but I’ve learned a lot from your advices! :smiley:

-peace-

Budello