Shadow Casting has LOD? Disappears as I move away, and quality is bad

I have a ceiling industrial fan spinning casting shadows from it’s main light source into the underground tunnel. The shadow it cast only shows when the camera/player is up close and if I move away from it, the fan shadows disappears and also the shadow quality around it is very low quality. The fan shadows when visible is too sharp and unrealistic. How can I fix this shadow rendering? Here is some screenshots of my problem:

I was able to find a solution after researching on Dynamic Shadows, Cascaded Shadows, Spot Lights, and Directional Lights settings. My solution was to make my one and only directional light in the scene cast no shadows, have 0 intensity, while still keeping ‘Atmosphere Sun Light’ and ‘Light Shaft Bloom’ turned on. Then I created a spot light for each ceiling fan and put it above the mesh so it can cast shadows. For the spot lights, I turned ‘Cast Translucent Shadows’, ‘Dynamic Indirect Lighting’, and set ‘Indirect Lighting Intensity’ to 4. Also turned on ‘Use RayTraced DistanceField’ and then I change the ‘Mobility’ to Movable. Now I have beautiful lighting from the ceiling fans! :slight_smile:

Here’s some screenshots, the shadow have no LOD and you can see it far away from it. It’s also a little bit more efficient - both performance and quality wise.

thanks for the explanation!

Really wanted to thank you for taking the time to explain it all. This was so very useful as to shadow hours of research by a factor of 100 to 1. Just awesome that there are nice people who take the time to help others, gives me some hope for this industrial revolution based society xD.

Hi Oblivion2500,

Looks like you’ve got a good look going for you scene. Really looks great!

Looking at your scene above from your original question, this looks like your meshes for the interior of the fan shaft are being occluded. Since UE4 uses scene depth, I would suspect this as a reason, but since you’ve got something that works for you that’s all that really matters. :slight_smile:

Tim