Greetings,
I am in the process of creating a visual simulation of planetary rings and have encountered a problem.
My project uses only dynamic lighting as all actors in the scene are movable and actually move.
My directional light is also set to movable.
The main issue:
The planetoid static mesh actor does not cast any shadow. Neither close dynamic shadow map, far dynamic, nor distance field shadow.
What I tried:
- Went through the Lighting Troubleshooting guide and tinkered with the values to reach what I wanted for the rest of the scene. While the values in the screenshot are mostly the default ones, changing them did not change the issue.
- Went through the whole dynamic shadow documentation, and tried Ray Traced Distance Field Soft Shadows. They do not help and they produce a lot of artifacts on my LOD meshes (that compose the opaque ring in the screenshot).
- Generate Mesh Distance Field for each mesh that needs to cast a shadow (still doesn’t work for the sphere).
So, what can I do for this big actor to cast it’s shadows?
I would like to keep the lighting and shadows dynamic as the whole system will move and static lighting does not really make sens to my eyes. If however there is a way to fake the user into belief, I will take suggestions.
Solved (but what is wrong here?)
The mesh is indeed the problem.
Here are it’s settings:
What is wrong with it except the collision primitive (totally different for the starter content sphere)?
Here are the screenshots of my scene and the problem:
Some details:
The asteroids have been set to not cast any far shadow.
As you can see, the sphere does not cast any shadow on the black-ish monolith but the ring itself does (through the sphere).
The planetoid details and settings:
And the movable directional light details: