Level Design Issues with dynamic shadows turning on and off by themselves

[Swift-Brutal-Death]

I am having issues with static meshes. It's a very strange bug and I'm not sure what causes it. Sometimes I will turn off cast dynamic shadows on a static or group of statics and when I load the level up again in the editor they have turned themselves back on. Also, sometimes a static that I have turned dynamic shadow=true will turn itself back off later on.

There are also very blinky twitchy shadows involved with dynamic shadows for me in the editor. When I move the camera they flash off and on. That I can deal with because in game they are fine, but it's frustrating to work with all the time.

 

[Mundgodt]

a bit late reply. but, it all makes perfect sense You cant make a mesh cast dynamic shadows if there are no dynamic lights afaik, then it will simply turn off as you said. Also, Whole Scene Dynamic Shadows dont show if your back is faced towards the light source. I guess this is for optimization purposes. Just use Per Object Dynamic Shadows instead

 

[[TW]Leland Scali]

I am having issues with static meshes. It's a very strange bug and I'm not sure what causes it. Sometimes I will turn off cast dynamic shadows on a static or group of statics and when I load the level up again in the editor they have turned themselves back on. Also, sometimes a static that I have turned dynamic shadow=true will turn itself back off later on.

There are also very blinky twitchy shadows involved with dynamic shadows for me in the editor. When I move the camera they flash off and on. That I can deal with because in game they are fine, but it's frustrating to work with all the time.

We added a system at build time that determines if a mesh is the shadow of another object. If the mesh is within the shadow of another object it will auto turn off cast dynamic shadow. If a mesh is in direct light from a dynamic shadow casting light, it will turn this flag on. This system runs at build time, there is a check box called "Check For Shadow Occlusion [TW]".
If you manually turn this on it will try and optimize shadow usage across the map. We usually only run this one time near the end of map creation. Sometimes we need to overwrite what the system thought was correct, so we change the flags in the mesh and then use the "Override Precomputed Shadow Occlusion" flag in the lighting properties of the static mesh component. If the map is built again with the Optimization ticked it won't overwrite your cast shadow flag settings. I hope this helps

 

[Swift-Brutal-Death]

Thanks guys! Appreciate the information!