Lights & Shadows: Medieval Game Environment extended tutorial

We’re revisiting this playable experience with a series of extended tutorials. Get stuck into these deep dives for a detailed look at the work involved in this atmospheric medieval village created in UE4.
Part 1: Performance Optimization • Performance Optimizati...
Part 2: Lights & Shadows • Lights & Shadows: Medi...
Part 3: HLODs • HLODs: Medieval Game E...
Part 4: Landscape Basics • Landscape Basics: Medi...
Part 5: Runtime Virtual Textures • Runtime Virtual Textur...
Get the full scene for free on the Unreal Engine Marketplace: bit.ly/2Z5NjZF
Full Medieval Game Environment tutorial series playlist: bit.ly/2Z3R1To
Get the Medieval Village Collection from Quixel Megascans. Free for use with Unreal Engine: bit.ly/3ACdSG1

[@shannenmr]

A few things I have read about this topic: * Point Lights are 6 - 8 times more heavy than Spot Lights and you can usually replicate the outcome using 2 spotlights back to back making sure not to overlap attenuation. * Sometimes you need to set the intensity / attenuation really high to get the look you want but then the attenuation volume is huge so has a big performance impact, by default lighting is using physically based distance fall off that causes light intensity to drop quickly over distance so you might want to disable it by disabling "Inverse Squared Falloff" and then play with the intensity and reduce the attenuation down. * If you want light flickering and don't shadows etc you could instead do it in the material for even cheaper using sine waves etc. * You want to set all your static meshes to "static" movability so each dynamic light that casts shadows can fully cache the projected shadows and not have to recalculate the shadows each frame. * You can increase / decrease the quality of the distance fields inside the Mesh / LOD editor screen to reduce the size in memory or increase the quality for specific meshes. * If you decide you don't want to do lighting builds / have static lights you can disable this completely within your project and it will reduce the amount of shaders you have to build for every mesh constantly. * You may want to use contact shadows instead for types of objects or at certain ranges as I have read they are low cost because they are using screen space. * Depending on your art style and requirements you might want to disable inset shadows and even use capsule shadows instead for your characters. (even if its just a performance menu option) * There are lots of shadow quality / bounces and similar command line / .ini options you might want to expose to your players as performance menu options to give people the ultimate control. * Use device profiles to change the quality settings and command line options per platform along with setting LOD and Texture Bias per platforms too.

[@rickfuzzy]

This was probably one of the most useful summaries of shadow performance I have every seen. Fantastic!!

[@HumaidEbrahim]

Would love to see more technical videos like these in the future

[@joakimmannerstal252]

Thanks for this breakdown it was really interesting. I would love to see more of these technical videos from a light, shadow, optimization point of view.

[@user-hm3io7sd9f]

아직 공부할게 많지만, 이 영상 덕분에 갈피를 잡게 되었습니다. 감사합니다.

[@lev869]

Soo, how much performance did you save with these settings? Great video though. I don't remember if these settings were ever explained in other tutorials.

[@suirel]

Thanks

[@MikheevAndrey]

Hello. Can you make tutorial about virtual shadows in UE5+? Or something about clipmap levels?

[@albertleonhart3093]

Why are there none of the links in the description that in all the videos they say there will be, with more information about the topics covered? Did someone think it was a good idea to update the description and make it the same in all videos and took the links ahead?

[@aubreypullman8847]

Hi Matt - Thanks for putting this video together! I really appreciated your explanation of the sun CSM+DF Shadows+Far Cascade. That's always been really confusing to me. I have a few questions about some of the techniques you covered: 1) How did you get that awesome shadow cascade debug coloring? 2) You mention the distance each CSM covers, but I don't understand how you calculated that math. Can you elaborate? 3) Normally, Unreal will not render a light with 0 intensity. Is this different for a light that changes value in Sequencer? I've never checked that before!

[@mattoztalay5713]

Hey Aubrey! The shadow cascade debug coloring is a rough approximation I built into a postprocess material, which I tweeted about (my twitter handle is just my name) If the distribution exponent is 1.0, then the distance each cascade covers is just the Shadow Distance / Number of Cascades. It gets a bit trickier if the distribution exponent is not 1.0. And I think actually you're right, I just like to have a bit of redundancy in place.

[@setlok]

~30ms rendering the scene ... what hardware do you have?

[@swordsmancity]

On earlier video (performance optimization...) they say they target 33fps/30ms, 1080p with 2080 rtx gpu.

[@jinno1236]

Man the videos are good, but what's with the intense boss music in the back 😂..