Ugly shadows?

Unity Engine
1

Hey guys, I’ve got all my settings all the way up (not that they make much of a difference) and my shadows are simply massively ugly. That doesn’t happen in any of my other projects, so I don’t really know what’s causing it.
Here’s a screenshot:

And here’s the link to a full-res view:
http://wolfos.org/resources/images/Screen%20shot%202011-09-23%20at%206.25.03%20PM.JPG

2

thats a pretty high shadow distance and a very thing object that casts the shadow. What light type is it giving the light there, a directional? otherwise it could additionally be caused by imprecision.

oh and a stunning number of pixel lights, you are on deferred right? cause the hardware to handle that on forward has not been released yet and won’t be released the next 4 years either (don’t forget, thats the count of pixel lights affecting a single object in parallel, not the number of lights in total)

3

Try pulling in the shadow distance considerably. Could just be that there’s too much suface area to cover with any amount of detail.

Also worth ensuring your object scales are reasonable.

4

1: I’m on deferred.
2: It’s a directional light.
3: shadow distance doesn’t make a difference at all and this is the absolute minimum I want to use anyway (because otherwise, you get this kind of effect).
4: I used the car tutorial as a base, so my object scales are the same.

Set my pixel light count back to 20.

5

Hmm, set it on hard shadows and now shadow distance definitely does make a difference (and it only looks ugly from a certain angle). However, to make them look good, I have to set back shadow distance so far I could just as well have no shadows at all.
Looks like this:
http://wolfos.org/resources/images/Screen%20shot%202011-09-24%20at%2011.08.26%20AM.JPG

6

That’s gonna eat up performance with 1000…

7
  1. that is a ‘problem’ but one that only exists on badly done games. If you did the environment right it should never be obvious where this border is. Only if you created the next game that shouldn’t have existed with “wide boring empty landscape” it will ever to be seen cause Dual Lightmapping otherwise will make it completely non existant (don’t give in to the daydream that you don’t need lightmapping in case you did, cause then you are on the wrong engine, Unity is about baking and little dynamic, cry is about nothing baked and all bombing the gpu ;))

and if you aren’t yet, go to unity 3.4, it got a new shadow algorithm for directional lights that makes a major difference

8

Yep, makes sense. Lightmapping fixed that problem and I turned down the shadow distance to 200 (player shouldn’t notice that). Shadows still look ugly, though.
You can’t see the images right now because we’re switching server by the way.

9

Bump, is it just a bug in Unity? In that case, fix please!

10

More commonly its not yet optimized setups and settings or just trying to go beyond what can be done due to precision limitations, the shadow algorithm etc
Which one it is is impossible to say from the information