[Official] 5.0 - Feedback request for Directional Light Shadows

I have tested new filter. I have no idea about technique but it is much more better. I didn't see any transition visible between cascades. For me, no reason to keep older one if PCF 5x5 filtering is better for both performance and look nicer.

 

I'm always in favour of progress at the cost of reduced support for older platforms. Remove it!

 

Let the old one burn!

 

the old method looked so terribly noisy that i wouldn't shed a tear if it vanished. one thing i wonder about is exposure of the shadow system? i'd like to see what the community could do with an extendable shadowing system. but i understand thats a lot to ask. =3

 

I'd say say... remove it? Besides getting rid of the noise, my selfish reason would be it should make it easier for me to implement penumbra scattering in my skin shader with less #ifdefs. Or so I'd like to say, but I'll have to support Unity 4 for a while anyway.

Here's what I meant by penumbra scattering, and a shameless plug:

 

How about a bool flag on objects that would turn Self Shadow on/off? This is common in 3D applications. Some objects don't need self shadowing whatsoever, artifacts could be lessened on problematic objects and rendering would be even faster in general. Just my 2 cents.

 

Not an issue for us.

You have our permission to remove it.

Cheers

 

U are the boss Aras. You can decide it. You always do best for us

 

I understand your concerns, but... some organic objects (like a human face) can have really bad shadow artifacts. Another solution could be the perfect shadow, but it seems even harder to achieve. Programmingwise, is it possible to automatically increase shadow quality as the camera gets closer to objects? (and decrease it as it moves farther)

 

No problems here on DarkfieldVR with 5x5 PCF, except the usuale ones with flickering on very near shadows (near clip plane 0,1), but this is not filtering related. You can dump the old method for our part.

 

Those weren't just concerns. Those are limitations of the algorithm. Unless you want to be rendering a ton of separate shadow maps, you just can't have an object selectively shadowed by other objects and not itself.

 

Drop it, it was a shame to have that for so many years anyways,

 

im more curious when the point and spot lights will have the ability to have nicer soft shadows. Mind boggling how they still look like 4 combined hard shadows shifted over each other.

 

Yea I was looking into shadow softener. Definently looks worth the money.

 

Is there a problem with leaving both options? Or just more upkeep?

 

Yea i agree.. i like the idea of keeping both as long as somewhere in the documentation it shows a screenshot of the difference and the performance benefits of one vs the other.

 

New version looks great! I was considering buying shadow softener, and this is exactly what the doctor ordered. Great job, team!

 

I did a quick test of both and can confirm the trade-offs are just as described in the OP (the visual part, did not test the performance).

PCF5 is more stable and penumbra size isn't fixed in screen space. Which is good, but you can't adjust the softness level or boost it like in screen space shadows.
Shadow acne is worse and to get rid of it you have to up the bias to a value that makes things floating too much. Just like in Unreal Engine 4, which uses PCF shadows.

If you find ways to limit the acne then, sure remove screen space shadows. Otherwise I'm not so sure.
And please, pretty pleease: definitely let us customize it and/or provide PCF8 or better.

 

I actually like being able to make the shadows softer and blurry looking.

 

Another thing you guys should add is a depth/normal bias value per cascade!

I noticed shadows flickering far away and if I could change that bias without having to sacrifice close shadow quality that would work

 

Even with PCF 5x5 filtering, shadows still flicker horribly inside a cockpit.

It is clearly not designed for that.

 

What about shadows casted by semi-transparent object? They look.... hmmm they don't look at all
I mean its just some strange grid that becomes denser when lowering transparency.
tested @b17, with standard shader with transparency.

 

My overall feedback:

1. I like the dithered transparent shadows, especially with PCF.

2. I find with the right cascades, dir shadows can be really sharp close up or even soft - I just lower the res a bit, so with balance.. I don't miss the slower shadows. Plus you know me Aras. All I will do is embrace speed. This faster? Yes, yes. This is used

3. Overall the only problem I have is that objects which don't cast or receive shadows in the distance makes the overall resolution lower, as if they are included in the bounds of the shadow depth buffer. Maybe a bug?

4. The join between cascades is visible with 2 cascades but not really a problem with 4. Not a bad trade off for the speed so I am ok

One thing I was thinking was it would also be nice to adjust the fade out value, when it is out of range. Back when we were doing Vita stuff, we gained speed here also because it meant our shadow distance could be closer... there is some waste of shadows when you fade out too soon.

Aesthetically a shorter or longer fade range suits a visual style better. Regardless I don't really need this, it was just a thought. I guess current range is the best safe range where you cannot see artefacts. Whatever

 

I'm not getting any shadows on iOS. xCode throws a lot of the following errors. I haven't tested too much, I could be missing something too.

ld: warning: direct access in Enlighten::InputLightingValidation::CheckForMalformedLightTypes<3>::Check() to global weak symbol guard variable for Enlighten::InputLightingValidation::CheckForMalformedLightTypes<3>::Check()::testIsMultipleOf16 means the weak symbol cannot be overridden at runtime. This was likely caused by different translation units being compiled with different visibility settings.

 

It seems like Playmaker was messing with the beta. After I deleted all the playmaker I spent the next two weeks coding everything in javascript. All good now.

 

Any plans for delving a bit deeper in this to really harvest the potential of PCF filtering? There's a ton of stuff you can do with it: http://developer.download.nvidia.com/presentations/2008/GDC/GDC08_SoftShadowMapping.pdf

I'd love support for PCSS. I'd be great to have more control over the shadow color (gradiation, coloration etc) as well, even though you might be better of doing that in the shader that receives the shadows?

 

Thats weak bro ; I was hoping for some more improvements ;

 

I think that the shadows are one of the weakest points in the real time pipe at the moment. PCF is cool, but it's pretty ugly without some noise breaking up the filter pixels, or even the ability to at least raise it to 9x9. Also the inability to change the softness of the light produces an unnatural (and jaggy) shadow which is infinitely semi-sharp. Overcast lighting can't simply be done. Now you can discuss if you really want to spend GPU cycles on nice blurry soft shadows, but i'd say that's something that should be decided on a per project basis, not as an engine limitation.

There are a huge number of techniques to choose from, many a bit more modern than PCF, as i'm sure you're aware of already. Distance field, convolution, sh exponentiation etc.

 

for overcast shadows couldnt you just use some trickery like an alpha mask for the light? I mean im all for soft fading shadows, but that example isn't a very good one since its not vital to do all that extra work for something that can be done another way.

 

I would replace all 5 of these with ray traced shadows like in ue - https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-45-released

 

I would drop Quality improvements for mobile and add higher PCF quality filtering for at least current-gen shadows..

 

burned. lol

 

Haha! True, not all would do want to loose that support, but WinXP is not even supported by Microsoft anymore. I totally agree on that you don't want to loose support for mobile/mac. You should ofc have the choice of using PCF (it's there already). And i really do agree with Shkarface that a higher filtering option would be the best way to go for now. I'm not sure the mobile devs would like to loose that quality improvement though...

On the current gen consoles 500mb of vram is not much. I wouldn't say that it's hard to use up the 3-4gb of vram you can get out of the unified ram architecture (current get consoles) on pure textures, but i think that anyone would agree that even a super sharp texture would look bad if it had a jaggy shadow moving over it.

Now baked shadows are great. You can even have them on big semi-open world games like Battlefield 3. They require really good tools, really good tech artists and a looot of time. They also come with the limitation that day/night cycles etc can't really be done if you don't choose to bake only the enlighten meshes/maps, but then you still have jaggy shadows from the sun (with the current filtering). They also have a practical world size limit (manpower and optimization time), even though theoretically you can bake and sustain (with streaming) a huge world.

kurylo3d, you can fake it at some extent for dynamic objects, but only if you have a static light source like the sky. We can't do it on Vane because we're not baking lights since we have a dynamic light setup with the sun moving around like crazy in some scenes. Time lapses with day&night etc.

Sorry for the wall of text! In the end it's all up to the Aras and his fellow coders to work on the priorities. I just want to see Unity actually seal the deal and make the graphics update complete and solid. To choose between PCF 5x5/9x9 would be a good start. No point in using PCF filtering if you're not taking it all the way imho.

 

Id be careful comparing consoles to pc games. Pc games may have more powerful gpus, but the fact of the matter is most people still have less then 1gb of video memory on their gpu. Consoles have the luxiory of sharing their graphics memory with other things... giving them around 8gb. But more features are always welcome either way.

 

Oh yes it's very much so. But PC is great in the way we can detect what specs the user is system has and make custom settings per machine.

8gb is kind of a marketing number. After all the system OS memory has been allocated you're happy to get a bit under 4gb (which is still dev heaven after the last gen stuff!)

 

• Pcss
• Contact Hardening Shadow
• Shadow soft value
• Prebaked static shadows
• Spherical & Capsules Ambient Occluder please (this can be considered as shadows right? )

 

Shadows don't seem to be working on mobile at all in RC3 - just so you're aware.