[Lighting and Shadows] Why do i get blocky, unsmooth shadows that make my mesh look low poly?

Development Rendering
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1

Hey there guys, I’m just trying to touch up my work so that i can get some renders for it for my portfolio when I noticed that my cliffs had gone lowpoly (or appear to be lowpoly even though they’re not?) It definitely has something to do with the way that the shadows are cast, i’ll attach an image with cast shadows on and off.
I’ve messed around with a bunch of different settings in the directional light and the sky light. if it helps at all, both are set to moveable.

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Let me know if you need any more information. this is my second project on UE4, so I’m a bit of a noob.

thanks a lot,

2

Hi XelaDoesArt,

Are you using tessellation on the material for those cliffs? Also have you tired setting them to stationary and changing their lightmap resolution?

3

Hey

No, the textures are not tesselated, and just tried setting them to stationary and rebuilding the light, but nothing happened. I’ve got the light map resolution of them at 256, is this any good?

Oh, and you can call me btw :slight_smile:

4

The cause of the issue is laid out in this thread, this post namely.

Long story short, use larger shadow bias in light settings.

5

Hey,

Yeh, i looked into this thread before and tried playing with the shadow bias but didn’t get great results. I’ll have another look into it again soon, see what I can do.

Thanks a lot,