How to improve shadows?

riffraffer

I'm going through the VR starter tutorial and I'm finding the shadow mapping textures seems to be stuck a really low resolution no matter what I change. I'm using a directional light with a GIProbe.

Here's a screenshot with the blocky shadows in question and some of my settings regarding shadow quality. I've disabled filtering to demonstrate the low resolution shadow a bit better.

Is this a bug of some sort? On other projects I've tested, updating the shadow texture size seemed to work. Is this project corrupted some how? Is there a workaround? Should I just recreate the scenes in a new project?

TwistedTwigleg

Strange, I don't remember having that issue when I last played the project. You are running the latest version from the GitHub repository, right?

The only thing I can think of that might be making the shadow mapping textures so low is the properties on the directional light node itself. If you have not already, I would look and see if the properties on the directional light node make any difference.

Also, welcome to the forums! :smile:

Edit: Another thing that may be causing the issue is the GI probe. I'm not sure if GI probes can modify the shadow quality, but maybe?

cybereality

How does the shadow look when you play the game? I believe the shadow cascade is based on the main camera, so it can look really blocky in the editor but look better when in the game.

riffraffer

@TwistedTwigleg I'm running 3.2.1 stable (edit: And yes, I'm using the latest VR starter tutorial from github). The directional light node's properties don't seem to affect the blockiness as expected other than messing with filtering which just makes it an amorphous blob with such low resolution. I've deleted the GI Probe and that hasn't changed anything either. I also deleted the light node and recreated it again. Same problem.

Good news is that only the directional light shadow maps are bugged. The shadow atlas resolution applies correctly for spot lights.

Also, welcome to the forums! Thanks! I almost abandoned this engine entirely because I thought there was a built-in limitation for shadow maps for a while.

@cybereality said: How does the shadow look when you play the game? Looks the same in game.

cybereality

I've used directional shadows in my test projects. There are some quality issues out-of-box, but I tweaked settings and they look pretty decent now. My guess is that your level is really huge and this affects the resolution (I'm not positive, but I assume the cascades would adjust to fit the level). This would make sense, as I don't see the issue in simple test projects. That may also explain why spot light shadows work (since they have a fixed size).

SIsilicon28

You could also improve shadow quality by setting the shadow's filter mode to something other than disabled in the project settings. This can help hide the blockiness of the shadows. :)

You can also reduce the shadow's maximum distance in the directional light. A smaller number gives you more resolution in a smaller space.

riffraffer

The reason I think the directional light shadow atlas size is bugged is because no matter what size I assign the size, the resulting image is the same. I don't consider the map very large, maybe 100x100 meters. I'm not familiar with "cascades," but even if every object in the map were to be rendered into the shadow map, I think the resolution would make a more visible difference.

This is 16384x16384

And this is 256x256

riffraffer

OK, thanks for your replies you two. After deleting the directional light, restarting Godot editor and then recreating the light and updating the directional shadow map size, it looks as I would expect in-game, but in the editor, it remains the same no matter what resolution I change it to still.

riffraffer

@SIsilicon28 said: You could also improve shadow quality by setting the shadow's filter mode to something other than disabled in the project settings. This can help hide the blockiness of the shadows. :)

You can also reduce the shadow's maximum distance in the directional light. A smaller number gives you more resolution in a smaller space.

I agree with those points on improving shadow quality at lower resolutions, but I was unable to increase the resolution in the first place. I disabled filtering to demonstrate the low resolution.

cybereality

You may be able to use the camera preview button (on the top left of the editor game window) do preview the shadow with the game camera. The editor camera does not seem to use the same placement of the shadows so they won't look great in the editor (AFAIK).