Bad shadows issue

[carl.sutton]

Hello,

 

I have this issue in my project where the shadows seem to be grotty and all liney (for lack of a better word! See pic), and objects seem to self shade themselves incorrectly. This has not been the first time this has happened either, as I first noticed it a while back when one of my sample projects decided to change itself to use shadows like these. I'm guessing I must have unknowingly changed something and this got written to the config file which then spread the problem to other projects. Problem is I never knew how to revert it, but upon reinstalling unigine it fixes itself in the samples. But now the problem has reoccured and I have changed every setting to my knowladge without any visual signs of this being fixed. Has anyone else come across this, knows what is going on with my shadow rendering or has an idea on how to fix this? Thanks in advance.

 

[ashwin.sudhir]

I'd suggest playing around with the Slope and Bias parameters of the shadow casting light(s)

HTH.

[carl.sutton]

Haha, It did help a lot! Thanks Ash. I can't believe I missed them when trying to get this to work. I guess it didn't help that when changing shadow size, the effect of these variables differ, as does the level of shadow softness which also has an effect on the overall artifact if not set correctly. Ideally I need to find a balance of values for each shadow size so that these tweakbales can be hidden to the user. As for this occuring in other projects, it seems that it was unrelated and was due to some bad occlusion post process settings.

 

Just one more thing. I have a scaled box in this picture (see below) and the shadow it casts is of a very odd shape. Are their any restrictions to shadowing scaled objects as there are with the physics system on scaled objects?

 

Edit: Scaling actually doesn't make a difference, but I still don't know why my shadows (dependant on orientation to the light) are drawn with such sharp angular artifacts, larger shadow size doesn't seem to make a difference, it only makes the artifact more crisp if anything. Where am I going wrong?

 

 

 

Edit: This only occurs when running in DX9. DX10/11 are fine. So finally, is there any way of making the shadows look better in Dx9?

[manguste]

Can't open the attached image. Can you reupload it?

[carl.sutton]

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12843270/shadow%20shape.png

[frustum]

This is Direct3D9 limitation. It's impossible to create seamless omnidirectional shadows because Direct3D9 doesn't support depth cube texture and array textures.

[carl.sutton]

Thanks for clarifying