With 4.6 we are getting large landscape support. Does this also include a solution for long distance shadow coverage? Currently landscapes look really bad with a movable light source and ToD. You get a really sharp cutoff on the shadows when they cease to exist past your distance parameter. You can’t increase this number without losing all your quality on shadows close to you either. It defeats the purpose of having a large landscape if you can’t get light and shadow to properly work on it. This is a very urgent matter for our team as we have a large open world map with lots of mountainous territory. The mountains should be casting shadows over the terrain as the sun moves across the sky. With a flatter map, this wouldn’t be as much of a problem. For ours, I am afraid we will be held up on any type of release until this is fixed.
Hi Josh,
You should take a look at Distance Field Soft Shadows as this will give you the longer distance for shadows you want with a dynamically lit scene. Docs here: Distance Field Soft Shadows in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation
There are some limitations with it that are known and listed. These will be addressed in future versions of the engine.
Daniel Wright walks through a demo of using the DFS in this twitch video from our Thursday Support streams: watch?v=DQt_OopZadI
This won’t fully help in your situation with shadows casting over mountains since Landscapes are not fully supported with DFS yet but this is a known issue and will be addressed at some point. A workaround here would be to use a static mesh for you landscape rather than the landscape tool in UE4.
Thank you!
Tim
As in documentation only Static Meshes Support Ray Traced Shadows. Landscape support is coming.