Buzzing hair shadows - any setting to mitigte this?

[ChubbiChibbai]

The hair occlusion shadows are pretty noisy. It certainly improves with higher settings and less reliance on up-scaling but never truly goes away.

I'm not seeing the same noise in shadows cast from the environment geometry - it seems to only be an issue with hair on faces.

Anyone else seeing this? Any idea if there is a setting to improve this at all?

[DrDeath_MD]

I am having the same issue m it's really distracting.

[ChubbiChibbai]

I think it's down to how the game renders it's hair. The hair looks like it's made up of particles and not solid geometry which means the shadows are noisy because it's just the shadow of the noisy hair.

I remember people having this issue in UE5 with metahuman back when that first came out.

[PixelOmen]

Completely agree.

[SciopticChimken]

Publicado originalmente por ChubbiChibbai:

The hair occlusion shadows are pretty noisy. It certainly improves with higher settings and less reliance on up-scaling but never truly goes away.

I'm not seeing the same noise in shadows cast from the environment geometry - it seems to only be an issue with hair on faces.

Anyone else seeing this? Any idea if there is a setting to improve this at all?

Its a post processing filter that cant be disabled in the menu. It affects everything in the game, not just hair. It also attributes it to the heavy oversharpened look and sharpening is tied to the post process setting as well as DOF, turning it to low does not turn it off. They need to add a sharpening slider for it tbh and not tie it to a setting, its possible its a bug for the hair because the hair is made with a hair card method and its just an alpha texture, its possible the renderer is incorrectly drawing the transparent shader for the texture map.

In short its typical UE5 garbage. I havent tried modding it yet but Lyall has already made a mod for it that incorporates a cutscene FPS cap removal as well.

[SciopticChimken]

Publicado originalmente por ChubbiChibbai:

I think it's down to how the game renders it's hair. The hair looks like it's made up of particles and not solid geometry which means the shadows are noisy because it's just the shadow of the noisy hair.

I remember people having this issue in UE5 with metahuman back when that first came out.

If it was made up of a particle method, then each strand of hair would individually be shaded and would cast their own appropriate shadow, but its super demanding to do it that way and would get around the issues you are seeing

[PixelOmen]

Publicado originalmente por RakataEpsilon:

Publicado originalmente por ChubbiChibbai:

The hair occlusion shadows are pretty noisy. It certainly improves with higher settings and less reliance on up-scaling but never truly goes away.

I'm not seeing the same noise in shadows cast from the environment geometry - it seems to only be an issue with hair on faces.

Anyone else seeing this? Any idea if there is a setting to improve this at all?

Its a post processing filter that cant be disabled in the menu. It affects everything in the game, not just hair. It also attributes it to the heavy oversharpened look and sharpening is tied to the post process setting as well as DOF, turning it to low does not turn it off. They need to add a sharpening slider for it tbh and not tie it to a setting, its possible its a bug for the hair because the hair is made with a hair card method and its just an alpha texture, its possible the renderer is incorrectly drawing the transparent shader for the texture map.

In short its typical UE5 garbage. I havent tried modding it yet but Lyall has already made a mod for it that incorporates a cutscene FPS cap removal as well.

Nah, it's not a post effect/filter. The shadows on the hair are clearly using a different rendering technique then everything else. I have that Lyall mod installed btw, it doesn't do anything to the hair shadows at all.

[SciopticChimken]

Publicado originalmente por PixelOmen:

Publicado originalmente por RakataEpsilon:

Its a post processing filter that cant be disabled in the menu. It affects everything in the game, not just hair. It also attributes it to the heavy oversharpened look and sharpening is tied to the post process setting as well as DOF, turning it to low does not turn it off. They need to add a sharpening slider for it tbh and not tie it to a setting, its possible its a bug for the hair because the hair is made with a hair card method and its just an alpha texture, its possible the renderer is incorrectly drawing the transparent shader for the texture map.

In short its typical UE5 garbage. I havent tried modding it yet but Lyall has already made a mod for it that incorporates a cutscene FPS cap removal as well.

Nah, it's not a post effect/filter. The shadows on the hair are clearly using a different rendering technique then everything else. I have that Lyall mod installed btw, it doesn't do anything to the hair shadows at all.

Then its gotta be the shading for the texture mapping then. Whether its a bug or intentional, I have no idea

[Ube]

has anyone found a solution for this? I haven't been able to fix the noisy shadows from hair on characters' faces

[ChubbiChibbai]

Publicado originalmente por Ube:

has anyone found a solution for this? I haven't been able to fix the noisy shadows from hair on characters' faces

Unfortunately not. I think there isn't much that can be done about it from the user side.
Hopefully it's something the devs can look into.

[Forseen]

The noise is caused by the low sample count of the soft shadows.

Go to appdata/local/Sandfall/saved/config/windows and create a file called Engine.ini


[/script/engine.renderersettings]

r.Shadow.Virtual.SMRT.RayCountLocal=0
r.Shadow.Virtual.SMRT.RayCountDirectional=0
r.Shadow.Virtual.SMRT.SamplesPerRayDirectional=0
r.Shadow.Virtual.SMRT.SamplesPerRayLocal=0

Add this into it.
Save and set the file to Read only or the game will delete it.
This completely disables soft shadows and gives sharp shadows instead. I wasn't able to get rid of the noise with soft shadows enabled.

[ChubbiChibbai]

Would increasing the samples not resolve it then - instead of just turning them off?

[Forseen]

Feel free to try

[edale1]

What cvars control the number of samples for soft shadows, and what's the game's default value for those cvars?