I was learning about deferred lighting and was seeing how it worked, and came across an issue… I made a point light that detected shadows while in the deferred lighting option (otherwise it wont work) and notice TERRIBLE shadows! I tried the spot light, and the shadows turned out crisp… See image below.
So what do i do 
Reduce the range of the point light so that the shadow texture doesn’t have to cover such a large area, and/or increase the shadow resolution.
–Eric
Didnt really seem to change at all, it looks exactly the same. I practically tried to change all the settings including the quality settings but those dont seem to be used in the deferred lighting option. I guess ill have to use a directional light for shadows for now.
You’re right, point light shadows are horrible in U3. I spent hours trying to get it to look half way decent without success. No choice here but to stick with 2.6.1.
Hmm, I found the point lights to be vastly better than 2.6, but that’s probably because I also switched to a 5870 from an X800 at the same time, giving me 4X the VRAM and thus higher resolution for point lights. This is what I get with a light, where I switch from point to spot and keep everything else the same…point is worse but not by that much. Also, quality settings are definitely used in deferred rendering.
–Eric
I think it depends on the scene. Given “ideal” conditions the differed lighting shadows in 3.1 look slightly better than 2.6.1, but in “non-ideal” conditions they suffer from severe jaggies. The first two shots are an “ideal” environment similar to what Eric created. But the third shot, also in 3.1, looks much more pixelated than either of the other shots. Also, note the strong banding in the lighting gradient in 3.1 versus 2.6.1. All scenes are on the same machine (vintage iMac with X1600 quality set to Fantastic).
I think the issue that I am running into is that when importing a project from 2.6.1 into 3.1 the first thing you notice (besides the loss of anti aliasing, another problem I have with 3.x) is that lighting gradients and shadows appear to be much poorer in quality. Although it may not show up in ideal test cases, in my working projects it becomes very obvious.
Original scene under 2.6.1
Same scene under 3.1, also note the severe banding.
A different scene under 3.1, tweaked to yield the best shadows I could but still looks very pixelated.
Same imaged zoomed in on the shadow.
they definetely need blurring or some post operation
Here’s a scene I made to see the shadows:
The same scene after I put a shred of effort into making it look good:
Could you post your project folder so I can take a look at it? You seem to have less jaggies than I’m experiencing… even after more than a shred of effort. 
I can’t upload it here. File size is too large for the forums (Note: when a 3 MB file is considered too large, then it’s time to rethink the attachment system).
Mediafire to the rescue!
Thanks, got it. I’ve got to admit your example looks pretty good. If you turn off the textures and move the point light around I see weird artifacts in how the light effect the surface, but otherwise it looks significantly better than it does in my example. What I haven’t been able to find is a reason why yours looks better than mine. We’re using nearly identical settings.
It could be hardware. I’m on a Mac Pro with an 8800GT card with Mac OS 10.6.5
Thanks for the compliments on my, literally, 5 minute scene. 
Potentially light range.
Antenna Tree on another topic indicated that this has an impact on the quality
I tried that. Anyways Infomercial’s light range setting is about the same as what I tried. He did use a specular shader on the capsules (I used a diffuse shader) and that may have effected it, although there are also some weird shading artifacts using that shader (on my machine at least, GeForce GTS360M).
Quality settings are the same too on the proj? Camera ranges and camera FoV? Object sizes and object dist to camera?
that are basically the factors that impact the shadow texel size or the shadow calculation
Would be very interested knowing where it comes from so basically throwing around possible reasons from the technical side of the matter
I’m still looking, but so far I haven’t found a significant difference in settings between his scene and mine. Here’s an interesting bit though, Using Theinformercial’s scene on my Windows machine the shadows appear in the editor, but on my Mac (iMac with X1600) they don’t. They only appear in the game window. But using my project they do appear in the editor window.
You have to set the rendering path in the player settings. You can also do it per-camera, but the editor camera uses whatever the player settings are.
–Eric
Yup, that was it.
