Hey y’all. Been developing for several years now and as my skill with environmental design grows, I’m facing new issues with lighting these builds.
Realistic lighting setting allows much better shadows which is perfect for my project and for the most part it works fine, however I’m increasingly getting these lighting shadow artifacts in my larger and more complex builds.
This is what my build should look like and does in specific angles
How is this environment set up? Generally, offscreen lights should still cast shadows to offscreen parts, but in these examples, both of them are onscreen but not working
It’s because the game automatically unloads any part that is not visible by the camera, so the parts casting the shadows disappear, also known as culling.
This is hard-coded into the game since they added it, and I’m not aware of any fixes for this.
For context, these were all screenshots from studio however the same bugs occur in playtests.
I’ve also narrowed it down as to what’s causing the bug (which is a weird one) and not sure how to correct it.
It seems that the other end’s series of lights were causing problems. Each tile has a pointlight and spotlight illuminating the space, which sounds like overkill but this is my main game lobby and I wanted it to look as high quality as possible.
Regardless, it seems by “disabling” the lights, the shadows are corrected but obviously I can’t leave that space without lighting.
On further inspection it has to do with ALL of the lights of this style in the area. If there are any remaining it affects the shadows casted by the window light. Very odd.
Solution turns out to have been the fact I had too many lights in my build. So many sources will apparently start affecting the (what I assume to be) most costly lights such as that one window source casting a shadow across the whole room.
I’m working towards reducing the number of lights in the room but if this helps anyone else with similar problems, this is what I found out!
