Realtime soft shadow problems.

I never tried these out yet, but at least in unity 5 im using a directional light with soft shadows... i get weird "tearing" issues in them that move around based on where my camera is moving. Here is 2 screenshots.. one with hard shadows which look fine and one with soft...

 

Looks like cascade splits to me.
I heard they were looking at making it blend better between cascades so the "split" is smoothed out more.

EDIT: Oh wait, looks like you're using the old style of soft shadows? Have you tried enabling PCF?

 

Not sure cascaded shadows is even a good engine choice these days.

 

I'm not sure why it wouldn't be a good engine choice?? Care to elaborate on that?

 

Well there's signed distance shadows now. So you can keep pretty much all you need in a single texture and render, while it degrades really well (for similar reasons SDF fonts render so well).

Plus typically when you're not using cascaded shadows, your resolution uber sucks when it goes into the distance. This gracefully degrades instead, mostly as a side effect.

I think a certain other engine does it, but when you get to the distance it just splats shadow instead. I'd have to look into it. Cascade is what Unity offers though.

 

Well, first I tried adjusting cascade distnaces .. no effect..
I tried turning off the cascades completely rather then 2x or 4x... tried it all.. no effect on any of them.
I tried PCF, but problem with that is it does not create any soft shadows... its pretty much just another hard edge shadow, maybe a slight blur to it. Looks good for that i guess, but i want soft shadows.

Any ideas? I am using unity 5s new deferred renderer.

 

Is this a bug ? espeacially since i adjusting cascade settings does nothing.

 

You using directional light?

 

yes

 

Isn't that the shadow cascade effect? CMIIW bigger distance per cascade blurier the shadow will be, and more noticable the cascade split area will be. you might want to set the zero and first cascade distance bit tighter to reduce that.
I got a best result with my settings, btw the shadow distance also affect the shadow looks

 

And thats with PCF? I will have to give that a try later tonight.

 

If your PCF shadows are too sharp, try increasing the overall shadow distance considerably.

 

Alright after relaunching unity.. whatever the reason.. the bug is gone.. it just isnt there and doesnt happen anymore. I changed nothing. Clearly this was some sort of bug for that session.