Hello everyone, I can’t for the life of me figure out why the shadows on my terrain look so poor when baked
Thanks a bunch cheers
Hello, thanks for the reply. I tried increasing the scale in lightmap with no luck but switching from subtractive to baked indirect seemed to do the trick, although I don’t believe subractive lightmapping should look that bad. I wonder what the difference between the two is causing the issue. Cheers
If your directional light is set to mixed mode, the main difference between those 2 modes is that using subtractive will cause the shadows to be baked, while using baked indirect will cause the shadows to be realtime. Realtime shadows are sharper, but incur a larger performance penalty at runtime.
Upon second inspection of your scene, I think I see what is wrong with the baked shadows. I didn’t quite catch it the first time, but the screenshot seems to be a of a cliff. Terrain lightmaps are essentially projected orthogonally down onto the terrain surface. If you have a large height difference, that height difference isn’t given much resolution in the lightmap, since its top-down orthogonal projection will be small. If you then have a shadow on that transition, the low resolution will cause it to look distorted.
Ah interesting, thanks for the info! Is there a way to have the quality of baked indirect shadows but not have it rendered Realtime and baked for better performance? I’ve noticed that baked indirect lighting looks much better than a directional light set to Realtime, is baked indirect more costly?
Thanks a bunch
A light with Mode=Mixed and Mixed Mode=Baked Indirect will incur the same performance penalty as a light with Mode=Realtime, regardless of which Mixed Mode you use. They are both doing the same thing - realtime shadowmapping. The only difference between a Mixed light and Realtime light when using Baked Indirect mode is whether we bake the indirect contribution (not shadows) into a lightmap.
Ah ok I see thanks for the information!