Hard lighting becomes soft when close to the floor.

Hi there, first of all I’m a noob with UE4 so I sorry if I don’t get things right away.

I’m working on a small game that uses the lighting as a game mechanic which means the player needs to know where lights and shadows start and end. So the lighting can’t have a smooth falloff.

The result is this:

This is pretty much what I want it to look like, but there will be things like flashlights in the game which can be placed on the floor and as lights get close to the floor (or any surface) the falloff of the light starts to look smooth.

Like this:

I don’t even know where to begin fixing this. I suspect some kind of post processing material might help with this but I’ve never used them before and they seem quite overwhelming.

Just set the Inner Cone Angle and the Outer Cone Angle in the light settings to the same amount, that gives you hard light edges.

This definitely helps get a much sharper shadow but unfortunately still becomes smooth when close to a surface. I need it to be a fairly consistent brightness all the way to the edge of the attenuation radius no matter where the light is in the scene.