BP_LightStudio causes shadow error in ParallaxOcclusionMapping

Hello,

I have recently bought Old Village assets from Marketplace which has some very nice looking modular buildings. However when I started using them in my project I discovered that said asset has problem dealing with ‘BP_LightStudio’ lighting from started content.

Problem is some shadow artifacts which appears when I get closer to the wall. After emailing the author about it He said that the ParallaxOcclusionMapping has problem with dynamic lights and all lights should be static/baked. He also said it can be partially mended with newly added “Contact Shadows” but there are nowhere to be found inside ‘BP_LightStudio’

I have tried:

  • Removing ‘BP_LightStudio’ from scene. But the scene doesn’t look good without skybox/sun/skylight. (but this one works)
  • Removing individual light sources from lightstudio and could say the culprit is the “sun” component. But removing that (replacement with static lights) doesn’t look good and is probably more taxing on HW
  • Setting sun as Stationary, which helps only until I rebuild lighting

I don’t have experience with ParallaxOcclusionMapping (only know the theory) to try fix it in material.

How it should look (and looks while in distance):

Artifacts when close:

Does anyone have possible solution?
Thanks

I also ran into this issue. When I selected a light source and turned shadow casting off, the problem went away. I read that you have to do something special with the POM nodes “Note - You might need to disable shadow casting on the mesh to get the correct visual effect. This is because the shadows are not accounting for the offset height and still trying to cast a shadow using the original mesh. There are ways to change this using the bottom half of the POM function, but…” (that article can be found here: A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements - Unreal Engine Forums )

I’m thinking of just using tessellation though because this is starting to cause my brain to melt, so if you find out a better solution I’d like to know too.

Ok I discovered something new about it, when I disconnected the Pixel Depth Offset in the graph, the self shadowing went away and I could then turn shadow casting back on, works fine. The only downside is that the pixels will no longer be pushed upward (as in intersecting with other geometry like true tessellation). Take a look at this video for plenty of good info: Paragon Feature Examples: Foliage & Parallax Occlusion Mapping | Feature Highlight | Unreal Engine - YouTube