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Directional light cast shadow distance and camera zoom important issue


Lunarovich
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Alright, this seems like a pretty important issue to me. As it is desirable and expected, directional light shadows are culled (not showed/displayed) when the camera is far away from the object: it has to be within the range of 30m or so, as I've seen so far, in order that shadows get rendered (at least with default light quality).

 

However, when camera is set far away from the object, but zooms in so that it appears very near to the object, shadows are not rendered either. If you think about it, that is a highly unrealistic behavior:

 

Imagine a camera that simulates binoculars. If we look through our binoculars, we are supposed to see the object as if it was near us. In that case, we would see shadows it casts if it is lit by the sun, no matter how far away our binoculars from the object actually are. However, with current LE settings it seems not possible to set cast shadow rendering distance based on the camera zoom level (I'm not sure if it's possible at all, btw - I've read some past threads and no one seems to give a definitive answer).

 

So, a simple improvment on the shadow culling calculation - which would consist in inclusion of dividing camera distance by its zoom level - would be an easy modifcation and more than welcome. At least, IMO.

 

P.S. I've tried setting light's quality to max. It does not solve the issue.

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Great! Thank you very much.

 

Btw 1, I've hit the strange issue of point light reflection on the static surface. I've run test on two different Windows with AMD: desktop and laptop. Namely, if I do a very large zoom on the cast light - the camera still contains the entire reflection in its view -, it starts to flicker on the desktop: the reflection is displayed every other frame. On the laptop, the cast light disappears completely as if there were no light.

 

Btw 2, wouldn't it be also OK to take account of a camera zoom when calculating the visibility of the shadow, as I've suggested in the first place?

 

EDIT

Point light flickers even on lower zoom levels when partially inside the camera view. Turning off the occlusion culling solves the problem. Should the light filcker with the occlusion culling enabled?

 

EDIT

The central issue of this thread, ie. shadow culling when camera far away and zooms in, does not happen with point light cast shadows. Is this the inconsistent behavior?

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