How can I make the light not display the player's shadow while having a bias of 3?

Detonatress

Anything lower than 3 just causes weird artifacts, and at 3 it casts the shadow of the player like this: This is where the light is at the moment: It looks fine if I put the light way further from the drone, but that might give me problems later on.

I've tried cull masking, but it still casts shadows. I am aware that I can just turn off casting shadows, but I want other kinds of light to make the player cast shadows, just not the one on the player.

Megalomaniak

Yeah, lights of this nature do need to be further along to the front. 2 reasons, first the floating point precision in positioning might be a bit of a problem, and second cascade shadows just aren't all that great. Someday raytraced shadows will be cheap enough and by their nature they will be essentially perfect. But that will never be the case for cascade shadows.

Detonatress

@Megalomaniak said: Yeah, lights of this nature do need to be further along to the front. 2 reasons, first the floating point precision in positioning might be a bit of a problem, and second cascade shadows just aren't all that great. Someday raytraced shadows will be cheap enough and by their nature they will be essentially perfect. But that will never be the case for cascade shadows.

Well, seems I'll have to make the ray casting account for shadow position. I want to have some crystals emit a shadow onto a zone of an object, and only when the shadow fits the hole it would activate a portal to next level. I'm considering adding 5 rays, 1 to hit the crystal, and 4 to hit the 4 corners of the hole, which will have invisible targets to confirm that the shadow shaded the hole.

EDIT: It seems like the bias problem only affects spotlights. Using an omnilight and putting it inside of a spotlight-shaped object is way better and requires lower bias to look good even on distant objects.