Blocky shadows on procedural terrain meshes

Question

I have created a procedural terrain because the default terrain didn't fulfill my needs. Now I am struggling to get a decent lighting to work on it. I have one directional light, which ideally should be realtime. As you can see in the screenshot blow there are ugly stripes on this very simple mesh. They seem to move when the camera is moving. I've tried a range of things, including:

Camera clipping planes
Baking (seems to have the same result)
Light Probes
Rendering paths don't seem to have any effect

The higher I set the shadow resolution, the thinner these stripes get. - The vertices of the meshes have all normals up - The meshes have one UV channel

Can anyone help?

alt text

Answer 1

Best Answer

Answer by DerNibelung · Nov 16, 2017 at 12:18 PM

The comment of Harinezumi was very helpful.

Though, Instead of taking a cross product I now iterate every vertex normal and check its neighbours. Then I simply add them (then normalize them) to get the "average" normal of both. Along with incorrect lighting setting (my sun was under a very low angle) this has solved the problem and now I get decent shading on this low-poly procedural terrain.

The blocky shadows where artifacted because my directional light was under the exact same angle of the surface. That surface didn't have the correct normals, resulting in very weird shadows.

I went ahead and added a shader to texturize by vertex color ;-)

Add comment · Share

Answer 2

Answer by Daemonhahn · Nov 09, 2017 at 12:58 PM

This looks like problems with the bias settings on your light.

Go to the light / lights and adjust any setting with "bias" in its name.

Add comment · Show 1 · Share

DerNibelung · Nov 09, 2017 at 02:06 PM 1

Share

Increasing the bias shrinks the shadow, but doesn't seem to remedy the interpolating effect.

This screen has bias 0 and bias 0.5 respectively: https://i.imgur.com/to6gR7j.jpg

alt text

Blocky shadows on procedural terrain meshes

2 Replies

Your answer

Follow this Question

Related Questions