Adjust Stride Shadows

[kathi]

Hi. I am working on a 3D Scene, where I need to have super nice shadows.
Two Questions:
1/ loosing shadows
If I want to connect the node LightStandardShadowMap I loose the shadows. (See path and images).

2/ finding settings
Can not find settings with good quality.

I am happy about every hint or trick to have a great quality.

I will also upload a testpatch.

shadows.vl (29.2 KB)

[chk]

This worked once pretty well for me

[kathi]

Thank you for that.

I still have these edges.

[motzi]

i don’t think you will get better results out of the box.
reason for this is - in a nutshell - that the light renders a depth image from its point of view, which looks like this:

this depth image is then used to decide (from the cameras position) wheter a pixel is shadowed or not. so the resolution of the depth image is responsible for the quality afterwards.
as far as i can tell the XLarge setting renders a shadowmap with 2048x2048 resolution and you cannot go higher than that…

[tonfilm]

Also note that you might need a specific shadow map type for a specific light type. look into the light nodes to see which one you need.

To improve quality, keep the scene “as small as possible” which means the near and far plane, as well as the extend of all bounding boxes of the entities in the scene. these two factors influence the shadowmap cascading and how much area they have to cover. the smaller the scene, the higher the resolution.

[seltzdesign]

I actually have a similar question and stuck with the same problem: shadow quality.

The problem: Obviously we want good shadows and increasing the shadow map size seems like a logical first step. I do that and the quality improves somewhat. But as soon as I have more than one light, XLarge means you get only one shadow map. If I switch to large, they come back.

set to XLarge:

set to Large:

Example Rings_2lights.vl (41.5 KB)

What I dont understand, is why it is so hard to get good results. I remember using the old Superphysical and such in vvvv and got some great results. Now it seems like we are moving backwards. The renderer has to recompile constantly when adding lights and so on, in the old system it was instant.

The shadows in Stride also seem incredibly bad for intersecting geometry as you can tell in this example if you lower the sphere to intersect the floor. Note how inaccurate the shadow is on the floor:

Here is a bunch of screenshots of stuff done with the old Superphysical:

That was 5 years ago and GPU power has increased by many factors. I get not everybody wants or needs high render quality, but it should be there for hardware that is capable at least.

What are the limiting factors here? Does someone have to create a better shadow system? Is it not possible to get some proper realism with Stride? I am worried…

[seltzdesign]

Here is another example of multiple lights in Stride. That large cube in the foreground is actually touching the floor, but looks like it is floating. The shadows are super inaccurate. I don’t know what to do here…