I am but a simple hair artist so this may be something easy, but can anyone tell me why my shadows are popping on my hair cards? It's most noticeable on the forehead. I assume it's some kind of culling thing?
while you wait for someone that knows, this video speaks about hair and lighting,
if it helps it would be beneficial to post the solution for others.
If i had to guess, it looks like some compensation is happening.
Appreciate the link, but these are hair cards rather than a strand groom. And I think the emissive lighting not working with strand hair is a by product of lumen.
i forget the name of the feature but there's a specific volume shadowing option for hair cards that drops off quite early - there's also a lot of options in the settings for lights that affect when certain features lod out and of course there's the thousand config options you can fiddle with. that said - you're using lumen so you're probably fucked and 'it'll be fixed in the next engine version honest'
Thanks @poopipe I understand now that lumen is the biggest issue here and I opened this for the first time in about a month the other day and thought, nah... we just need to start over. I'm not happy with the shader, the lighting... the whole thing so yeah, I think I'm just gonna switch off lumen
For what it's worth, this has been annoying me for the last few months so I did some digging and debugging and found out that the culprit was indeed the virtual shadow maps and that I could see the clipmap/mip level issues in the debug view. Directional light popping: Debug view: For the directional light, I edited the .FirstLevel and .LastLevel values to have a different range. Default first level is 6 and last level is 22. I changed it to 10 and 30. Now I have a consistent clipmap when zooming in and out and if I go very far it's no longer noticeable. However, this caused lots of artefacts on the body of the mesh. So I decided to lose the deep shadows I was getting from the directional light and just have more flat shadows by setting .FirstLevel to around 1 and .LastLevel to around 2. This created consistent shadowing but more flat shadows. For the rectangle and point lights, I saw the same issue in the debug view: To solve this I edited r.Shadow.Virtual.ResolutionLodBiasLocal to -3. This considerably increased performance costs, but for a basic character presentation setup I'm OK with that
EDIT I ended up setting the LastLevel to 10 and r.Shadow.DistanceScale to 100. With all the other lights on, I can't see any popping Current render:
Replies
there's also a lot of options in the settings for lights that affect when certain features lod out and of course there's the thousand config options you can fiddle with.
that said - you're using lumen so you're probably fucked and 'it'll be fixed in the next engine version honest'
Directional light popping:
Debug view:
For the directional light, I edited the .FirstLevel and .LastLevel values to have a different range. Default first level is 6 and last level is 22. I changed it to 10 and 30.
Now I have a consistent clipmap when zooming in and out and if I go very far it's no longer noticeable.
However, this caused lots of artefacts on the body of the mesh. So I decided to lose the deep shadows I was getting from the directional light and just have more flat shadows by setting .FirstLevel to around 1 and .LastLevel to around 2. This created consistent shadowing but more flat shadows.
For the rectangle and point lights, I saw the same issue in the debug view:
To solve this I edited r.Shadow.Virtual.ResolutionLodBiasLocal to -3. This considerably increased performance costs, but for a basic character presentation setup I'm OK with that
EDIT
I ended up setting the LastLevel to 10 and r.Shadow.DistanceScale to 100. With all the other lights on, I can't see any popping
Current render:
Now, I just have to sort the noise...