Shadows are very hard/impossible to get right

Altair1234

So I accidentally clicked Enter and have to explain the problem here. As you can see, either the shadows are "not enough" or "too much". I have also increased the atlas size in Project Settings, besides fiddling with the node's Shadow and Directional Shadows settings. Please let me know what I can do to get good shadows. Something that a) makes the bottom of the crater have shadows (which I can't get to work no matter what) and b) doesn't make the character look possessed by a demon/floating in the air would be a great starting point :)

cybereality

You have to play with the bias and contact values. Move the bias very slowly (like 0.11) until the shadow acne goes away and play with contact if the shadows don't connect with the player. Sadly it is hard to get it perfect, but you can get something okay. Also consider baking the light on the static objects using the baked lightmap node. This will be substantially better quality for non-moving objects.

Altair1234

I did try the bias and contact settings. And I get them like bearable for the player shadows but for the terrains they just don't work at all. I have given examples of both too little and too much shadows. As for baked lightmaps, do I need to remove the Directional Light node after baking? If not, that didn't seem to fix the problem for the terrain either.

cybereality

For the best quality, you can set the directional light to bake mode all, then select the terrain mesh and set it to use in baked lightmap (also make sure it has a UV2 map, you can create one by selecting the mesh and then clicking mesh at the top of the window and create UV2). Sadly, Godot does not work well with combining real time and baked shadows on the same object. So you will lose directional shadow on the player unless you create another light.

Altair1234

Yes, baking all seems to have fixed the problem. Thanks!

Calinou

For the record, this question was cross-posted on Reddit.