Shadow Penumbra

[vitquay]

Is it possible for Dominant Directional Light shadows to have soft shadow penumbra?
It seems only Toggleable Directional Light get the result that I want but i heard it's not good to light up the whole outdoor level with Toggleable Directional light for performance reason.
I don't like the hard shadow that DDL cast. I know that I can change the Distance Field Shadow number and it'll soften it but it only either do hard only, or soft only. It can't do hard to soft penumbra like TDL. I posted about this before but this time I made screenshots that might explain better what I want.

please help! thanks

[Wyldhunt]

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Light...Light Settings

Try adjusting your Light Source Angle in your light settings.

[vitquay]

i did. doesn't seem to change anything since the Distance Field Shadow overwrite all that I think. If you look at all of the default maps that comes with UDK. They all have that razor sharp shadows in their outdoor scenes. DFS was made to take away the "steps" shadows cause by low resolution. I don't really mind the "steps" though. I would prefer the pixelation over crisp shadow that doesn't diffuse over distance. I just need to find a way to turn off Distance Field Shadow for Directional Dominant Light i think. thanks for you help though.

[vitquay]

still need help. anyone?

[glra2222]

has anyone found a solution to this?
I can get a point light to cast a penumbra but I have to turn on 'force dynamic light' and that makes everything overly shiny. I also have to turn the Light Shadow Mode to LightShadow_ModulateBetter and have min shadow resolution at 2 and max shadow resolution at 250.

However, I have been told that this is the incorrect way of getting a soft shadow penumbra.

Also, for some reason, there is no difference whether I have lightmass turned on or off - meaning that my lighting does not use lightmass - yet it still looks pretty good.

[Hellclown]

use the DomDir in conjunction wiht several less powerful directional lights(no more than 3) and/or a skylight. the total brightness for all of them should add up to no more than about 1.5 or it look really bright.

[glra2222]

use the DomDir in conjunction wiht several less powerful directional lights(no more than 3) and/or a skylight. the total brightness for all of them should add up to no more than about 1.5 or it look really bright.

so... is this supposed to generate the shadow penumbra? wouldn't it use up more performance?
I think I may have found a solution.
If you go into the *.uc files and lookup those files related to lightcomponent, inside, you can unlock all of the hidden features by changing anything with just var to var().
I did this and created a soft-shadow penumbra using environmental lighting.

[Xendance]

I don't think the distance field shadows support varying shadow penumbra size based on the distance between the occluder and the surface where the shadow is being cast.

[unreal_polyneutron]

Man it's amazing! Please post your TDL settings to try it out 'cause when I try to replace my DDL with TDL my level's shadows become static and render with OLD static lighting tech (like in UE 3.0 games) whether I rebuild lighting using Lightmass or not...