EEVEE REALTIME SOFT SHADOWS COMEBACK
Hey! I would like to propose a feature that was originally cut in blender 2.80 for a sample based system. Eevee soft shadows were an awesome feature that enabled artists to render their scenes in actual REALTIME and nowadays with better GPU`s and post processing injectors like RESHADE, rendering realtime in EEVEE has become better than ever, except for realtime soft shadows. With 2.81, realtime soft shadows were removed from Eevee and replaced with a samples based system which locked every artist that wanted to render realtime behind the rendering pipeline from blender.
I know a lot of people don`t mind rendering offline, but 30 frames a SECOND is 30x times faster than ONE frame a second. Think about that for a second.
The soft shadows were a simple softness parameter found in each of the light source properties and let u easily adjust the amounf of softening, allowing you to mix between accuracy and smoother lighting/shading .
EEVEE SOFT SHADOWS EXAMPLE: youtu.be/MpR5e6UwiHA
ANOTHER REALTIME EXAMPLE WITH RESHADE (30FPS WITH SOFT SHADOWS IN 2.80): youtu.be/U7OGreoMXLM
7 Comments
I am not proposing to add back ESM or VSM but rather a new PCF shadow filter for blurring them just like in 2.80 :)
I know this post is getting old by now, but I really hope somebody with a say finds it. With things like VR support being worked on, its important to have alternative options that don't require multiple samples.
Aside from how easy/hard it would be to implement, there's no disadvantage to having this as an option again, even if most people ignore it
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Is there a real time soft shaow in 2.80 though? I have 2.80 here in my machine but I don't see what you said. What I see is a sample based soft shadow in 2.80.
* @EaryChow * go to ur light properties! :) youll see a softness parameter there
* @Anton * I just checked it out, it basically just blurs out the edges, which is far from correct. It has nothing to do with the size of the light source, and it has a max value of 100, which is still not soft enough for some larger light source. It works even worse with multiple light sources, It does not combine the multiple shadows like the sample based soft shadow does, instead, it blurs out individule shadows as their own. I understand why they deleted it, and I don't think it should come back. Its default value is 3 and it is making the shadows incorrect as a default, which is not good.
* @EaryChow * they shouldnt be bringing back that system but rather introduce new realtime shadow filtering for PCF shadows. theyve been done before in numerous other engines