Directional shadows blocky and flickering

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Hi all

Okay, so I bought Unity Pro and wanted to try out the directional shadows in my existing project only to find out that this feature doesn't really work. They are very blocky, and they flicker, using different biases didn't helped with either of it. I checked both the Shadow map size and the cascades, both are at the max (and trying a different value didn't helped either)

All object have cast and receive shadows set, I only have one directional light in the scene with force pixel, and my graphics card is a new ATI 5870, so it should work there (not sure if it could be a driver problem)

The only thing I could think of is that my terrain is 4000 x 4000, could that lead to a to large shadow map and therefor very blocky shadows? Would a lot of smaller terrains built together help? Or is the directional shadow feature in Unity 2.6 just not usable at all as some people pointed out in the internet?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Regards

Gian-Reto

Answer 1

Answer by Eric5h5 · Jul 11, 2010 at 11:15 PM

Reduce the shadow distance. Also, if changing the shadow resolution and number of cascades didn't make any difference, make sure you're actually using the appropriate quality level that has the desired settings.

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yeoldesnake 1 · Jul 14, 2010 at 03:42 PM 0

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yeah the high distance = crap shadows sucks but why does it actually happen?

Eric5h5 · Jul 14, 2010 at 05:43 PM 0

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@YeOldeSnake: the docs explain shadow quality: http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/$$anonymous$$anual/DirectionalShadowDetails.html

Gian-Reto · Jul 16, 2010 at 09:30 AM 0

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Okay, so I made sure that the correct quality settings are taken.

Fantastic for everything, I see it's taken by changing the texture Resolution (which seems to also affect the unity GUI, by making the icons blurry)... works fine. I also can disable shadows, set them to hard only, I can decrease the shadow distance so that I see shadows fading in 1 meter distance.

BUT: All this doesn't help, the shadows still flicker and are as blocky as before, no matter how small the shadow distance is.

Now, I have also a problem with Antialiasing in that its not beeing applied no matter how I set it.

Gian-Reto · Jul 16, 2010 at 09:32 AM 0

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Could this point out a problem with my Graphics card or its driver rather than my unity settings?

I Use a 5870 Vapor-X with 2 Gigs of $$anonymous$$emory. I use the newest Catalyst driver, 10.6.....

I think if I got time I try the older Catalyst driver today, just to test if it makes any difference.

Catalyst drivers for 5XXX card are said to still be quite buggy, but I haven't noticed anything outside of Unity, which is quite strange.

Answer 2

Answer by Acreates · Mar 09, 2017 at 04:33 PM

@Gian-Reto After trying everything and reverse engineering everything I tried before, I was able to find an interesting culprit; Occlusion culling. I cleared Occlusion culling and the shadows stayed and no longer flickered away when I looked at them or moved to different angles. What I initially noticed was the tree shadows were fine, I was using the terrain/tree painter instead of hand placing. I'm going to re-run occlusion to see what happens.

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Answer 3

Answer by gochi7 · Mar 11, 2013 at 05:54 PM

I had this problem with hard shadows, then I swapped to soft shadows and lowered the strength, maybe this could help you too

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Answer 4

Answer by Xanthius · May 31, 2013 at 09:49 AM

Make sure your far clipping plane on your camera isn't too high or you will see weird artifacting

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Cowboy_Jow · Jan 12, 2014 at 04:39 AM 0

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This worked for me. I added an extra camera for the near clipping plane from 0 to 100 and the far camera I set to vertex lit. no more flickering shadows.

Directional shadows blocky and flickering

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