Hi guys,
I’m new to Unreal Engine, so please forgive me if this feature is something that already exists.
I’m lighting a huge environment for VR where the actor will stay inside a very limited area. It’s important that the props around the player are always lit and shadowed in a visually consistent way - particularly for my sunlight. Cascading Shadow Maps are doing a decent job, but I’m struggling with “fly in” style shots, where the camera sweeps in to the game area from a distance, before the game starts (these will be part of a pre rendered demo). Is there are a better approach than CSM for this type of scenario, where the camera ends up close to the “game area”, so I need high quality shadows for that particular area of my level, but the visual impact of CSM for large camera moves is too high?
I have a long background in VFX for movies, and Unreal feels a lot like Pixar’s Renderman back in the day, with lots of tricks involving baking, shadow maps, tons of knobs everywhere etc. What we used for scenarios like this, which is similar to CSM in a way, is to have world space bound shadow maps. You’d place a bounding box in an area of a scene, and this area gets its own shadow map for a given lightsource (you’d set the wanted resolution on the box). You could then carefully place several bounding boxes for any areas that needs high detail lighting, and the rest of the scene would get the “regular” shadow map which bounds the whole scene. Very akin to how Reflection Probes works in Unreal. Is this - or something similar - achievable in Unreal?