High shadow filtering quality gives pixelated shadows

Hi!
I’ve been struggling quite a bit with my shadow quality where I had nice shadows and then suddenly now I have very sharp and pixelated shadows like you can see in the screenshot below

The very weird thing is that when I switch to low quality filtering I have smoother shadows?!

Now my settings in the HDRP asset are the following, I’ve read the blog post Unity Blog to set it up

Also, I’ve read that the angular diameter should influence the PCSS filtering too but its changes nothing at all

Finally the Unity version is 2019.3.0f6 with HDRP 7.1.8
Any idea where I’m messing something up?

6194650--679495--upload_2020-8-12_10-11-17.png

Hey, can you post an image of your (directional?) light inspector, showing all parameters?

Sure here are the settings of my directional light

I think everything is setup correctly, the Angular Diameter doesn’t affect the softness of my shadows and Idk why even when I crank up the High Quality Settings

My volume settings for the shadows seems ok too like the splits should give the atlas enough resolution for my shadows to be fine
6198848--680162--upload_2020-8-13_10-38-39.png


6198848--680162--upload_2020-8-13_10-38-39.png

Thanks, yes it seems to be correctly set up.

Now, I see your using “Both” for the lit shaders mode in your hdrp settings, rather than “Forward” or “Deferred” only. See if you still see these pixelated shadows with one of these 2 (especially Forward).

I’d start by upgrading HDRP: 7.1.8 has some bugs on PCSS which are fixed on later 7.x HDRP versions.

Setting it to Forward only didn’t made the fix

I’ll see with the devs if we can update the HDRP package to fix that PCSS issue

So upgrading to 7.2.1 fixed the PCSS issue but damn upgrading the hdrp will take ages as its going to import all fbx again and upgrade all the mats

Hello,

I am still having the problem of pixelated/poorly filtered shadows when using “High” quality filtering mode in HDRP, version 12.1.1. Medium and Low look much better.

Thanks

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What fixed it for me was enabling TAA (don’t forget to enable it for the scene view camera as well)

I see that the OP has these settings already tweaked, but in case someone, who comes here later, missed it: the reason for the immediate dip in shadow quality when switching to High Quality lies in the fact that there’s now a new subsection in the Shadows section of the Light component. And not only its default settings are bad, to say the least, it is also hidden behind the More Options button, which is bound to confuse new HDRP users, such as myself, as I went through every possible shadow setting in the project, before accidentally discovering the presence of the button from this video:

The default values, set the way they were for some reason, made the shadows look jagged and pixelated and too harsh, but tweaking them was what solved it for me.

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Thank you DimWit, lol at the name, cause that was what fixed the issue for me!!! I had to turn up the Min Blur Intensity. Thanks!

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