Quality of lightmapped shadows - worst is better ?

Unity Engine
1

Ok i’ve been playing a lot with shadows trying to get the exact effect i was lookin for, which was actually nothing more than a normal looking terrain shadow :slight_smile:

I decided using lightmapped shadows and i was tweaking a lot with parameters (resolution and shadow super sampling). I did not want to use resolutions higher than 1024 because it takes too much to elaborate on my pc and also because i thought there is a way to get nice looking terrain shadows (no big shadow squares) even at that resolution. But the result was always too much pixelated. So in the end i tryed to play with quality, lowering the overall textures quality and what i got was exactly what i was looking for. Nice blending-with-terrain shadows even at 1024 resolution. The only problem with this is that all textures are affected so every other thing looks less detailed…

I am attaching 2 screenshots so this is easier to understand: in the first one, quality setting for texture quality is on “full res” while in the second it’s on “half res”.

I really prefer the second one to the first one, i don’t care loosing some “shadow detail” if that means better shadow blending.

So can anyone advice me a way to get this effect (which, in the end, it’s just about lowering lightmapped shadow texture quality - thus getting a better result with less cpu work) only on shadows rather than on all textures ?

I really think they look better that way and i’m not even sure they’re gonna look like that at a 2048 res.

Screenshots following.

Thanks very much for your help and I hope this post will help someone else as well! :slight_smile:
…and sorry for the long post! :slight_smile:

198885--7312--$textures_full_quality_188.jpg
198885--7312--$textures_full_quality_188.jpg1144×545 27.5 KB

198885--7313--$textures_half_quality_567.jpg
198885--7313--$textures_half_quality_567.jpg1008×452 17.4 KB

2

Have you tried setting the resolution of your texture to 512x512 but leaving the quality setting at full res?

3

I think the root of the problem is that Unity’s built-in light mapper just jitters the light location to produce “higher” quality images, even though the result is still horribly aliased and doesn’t make much sense. Using half resolution textures resamples the result, softening it nicely. You could get a similar result blurring the Unity-created lightmap by two pixels in Photoshop, and optionally saving it at half resolution.