Directional shadows blocky and flickering

Questions & Answers
1

Hi all

Okay, so I bought Unity Pro and wanted to try out the directional shadows in my existing project only to find out that this feature doesn't really work. They are very blocky, and they flicker, using different biases didn't helped with either of it. I checked both the Shadow map size and the cascades, both are at the max (and trying a different value didn't helped either)

All object have cast and receive shadows set, I only have one directional light in the scene with force pixel, and my graphics card is a new ATI 5870, so it should work there (not sure if it could be a driver problem)

The only thing I could think of is that my terrain is 4000 x 4000, could that lead to a to large shadow map and therefor very blocky shadows? Would a lot of smaller terrains built together help? Or is the directional shadow feature in Unity 2.6 just not usable at all as some people pointed out in the internet?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Regards

Gian-Reto

2

Reduce the shadow distance. Also, if changing the shadow resolution and number of cascades didn't make any difference, make sure you're actually using the appropriate quality level that has the desired settings.

5

@Gian-Reto After trying everything and reverse engineering everything I tried before, I was able to find an interesting culprit; Occlusion culling.

I cleared Occlusion culling and the shadows stayed and no longer flickered away when I looked at them or moved to different angles.

What I initially noticed was the tree shadows were fine, I was using the terrain/tree painter instead of hand placing.

I’m going to re-run occlusion to see what happens.

3

I had this problem with hard shadows, then I swapped to soft shadows and lowered the strength, maybe this could help you too

4

Make sure your far clipping plane on your camera isn’t too high or you will see weird artifacting