Hi guys,
I’ve been trying to achieve something for many weeks trying to read all ressources on the subject but it actually failed… Is there a way to have indirect shadow (AO) from stationary skylight with movable meshes ?
When the mesh is set to static i have this nice smooth indirect shadow (AO) but when i try with movable meshes the mesh cast no shadow and seem to “float” over the floor (the scene has only a skylight, no direct light).
I tried with distance field AO like in Fortnite demo, but for indoor scenes it is really bad looking
If you’re not using any Directional Light or any lighting in your scene I would expect to run into the problems you’ve listed above.
Can you post some screenshots of what you would expect it to look like and what you’re actually getting. I’ll see if I can whip something up with the settings available and offer some feedback and tips.
Thanks for answering. Here is an old scene i made.
Everything is set to static. I have a Dir light, and a skylight. What i want is to have the indirect shadow (Sky Occlusion from Skylight) to work with movable objects. The aim is to interact with assets and change them, not ony the texture but also the mesh itself, and keep this soft sky occlusion that makes the scene so realistic.
Problem is that movable meshes don’t receive skylight (or the AO from it) except using skylight set to movable and enable DFAO. But DFAO does really bad results for indoor scenes…
So i’m more looking for a way to fake them if there is not such tool; like Last of Us character indirect shadow…
Without using something like DFAO, you’ll not be able to do this without faking it.
The only real idea I have that may work is to use a similar effect that was used in the Showdown VR demo. Attached to the mesh will be a mesh or plane that is using a material to create the illusion of an ambient shadow beneath an object or using scene depth to completely fake shadows.
Here are two examples from Showdown VR demo that I mentioned above.
I hope this helps.
EDIT: eek. those kind of uploaded in some bad quality, but hopefully they still get the idea across with what’s going on.
Thanks for sharing those, but basically how does it work ?
I mean how you get the “appear when touch the floor” thing (i don’t know if i explain it correctly)…
I think i could do something like this, but how to avoid the “flying” shadow (if i attach a plane or a mesh under the main mesh, i don’t understand how it is visible only when the mesh touch the floor)
Are this available in the Marketplace anyway ?
This is all just using a Mesh (specifically a box mesh on the car) and materials. The one for the car is using scene depth to create the shadow. I only had it moving up and down to illustrate that the mesh that the material is applied to will render the shadow below it. So when the mesh moves out of view, like that one you will no longer see the shadow. As for the character I think this one is setup using a sphere mask, but I could be mistaken. I’m not super knowledgeable with materials, at least not explaining the magic that they can do.
This content is available in the Showdown VR demo. If you go to the Epic Games Launcher and then to the Learn tab, you’ll find it listed under Engine Feature Samples.
These two assets are named:
Car: BP_Car
Character: CharacterSkelMeshes
If you look in the components window of these Blueprints you’ll be able to see the attached mesh that is used for creating these shadows and then in-turn take a look at their material setups.
