Enable ShadowMap or Future lighting
Insert any large meshpart
Expected Behavior
The mesh has a single shadow with a clear silouette from the sun, using shadowmap tech
(using below workaround)
Actual Behavior
on top of the main shadow theres still heavy voxel shading involved, which causes many artifacts on custom meshes, can only be disabled by changing the collision to box (why?) and has a weird brown color that’s not affected by anything (other than ambient, which also affects everything else in the world)
Meshparts: You can set its collision fidelity to “Box” (this removes the huge shadow artifact for some reason). It means that I must have an additional copy of the mesh acting as an invisible precise collider, not ideal for performance if the mesh is used lots of times.
Other part types: no workaround
this bug seems to be tied to the parts collision box
Is there any update on this issue? This has had a serious impact on our development as there has been really bad lighting issues on large mesh parts.
Most of our game uses large mesh parts, and this issue doesn’t go away unless we use Box collisions. That leaves us with one option, which is to create a duplicate invisible version of the map that uses the correct collisions. This isn’t optimal, and we are worried of the performance implications that can occur.
Unfortunately we still have this issue, and it has resulted in our team having to delay any content involving the work that uses large meshes. This affects a large portion of our game, including performance and optimization for complex shapes that we have to build out of normal parts.
I can provide some insight on this issue. What you’re seeing here is a result of what we call our “sky visibility” system, which is used to cast shadows for light coming from the sky. Regardless of the chosen lighting technology, sky visibility will always use our underlying scene voxelization to calculate its shadows meaning that the resulting shadows will be less detailed than the ones you would get from the sun or local light shadow maps for example.
One interesting quirk in our voxelization system is that we share some data with our collision/physics systems, meaning that collision fidelity can have an impact on voxelization quality. This is something we’re meaning to resolve, but I have no specific details or dates to share with you right now.
Hey, thanks for the response on the report, I almost lost hope that it would ever be resolved.
Would it be possible for a small part of this change to be prioritized and come earlier? something as simple as disabling these extra shadows (without the performance heavy workaround) would benefit a lot of environments, I hadn’t heard of such a system existing on roblox, it isn’t documented at all so it came as a surprise to find out about it.
In the future I imagine an important part of updating this system would be to either allow separate control over its color and softness or tie it to existing lighting properties like the sky ambient, because the default dark brown looks ugly in a lot of cases (even when the shadows are well cast and not bugging out)
If this does get resolved, we would be able to increase performance in our game by a ton. As it currently stands, we have to create pseudo-meshes out of a ton of parts in order to create a visually similar design. This creates an incredibly high tri-count.
Right now we are able to create very basic shapes without these weird voxelized shadows. But for more complex shapes in areas where we have unique rock structures, we cannot. This means we have to sacrifice heavy amounts of player performance because of this feature, sadly.
I appreciate the update on the matter, our team has been struggling because of this.
