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  • Published 14 Sep 2021

Bring back VSM Shadows

The next version right after 2.8 was released had some "improvements" on Eevee shadows, getting rid of ESM and VSM, and for a reason.

For beginners it was confusing and hard to get a good result with so many shadow settings, currently theres only a few settings for shadows and you can get a good result without much tweaking.

However, for users that already know what they are doing, not having those settings and not having VSM is a downside, because currently the shadows look worse than in 2.8 launch, not only shadows but volumetrics had less bleeding through walls ( probrably also because of the shadows being better ) and Ambient Occlusion had a much cleaner noise look, almost felt like film grain and it had a much sharper look overall, while now it looks very unrealistic and you want to get rid of the noise at all costs because it looks terrible, heres some comparassions :

Blender 2.8 : 2.8shadows.jpg Now : currentshadows.jpg

Heres how volumetrics and AO behave :

Blender 2.8 : 2.8general.jpg Now : currentgeneral.jpg

Something to note though, other than Ambient occlusion, shadows and volumetric bleeding, everything else looks much better, volumetrics look smoother and have more control, Bloom has a higher definition now, and like said before, its easier for users to get an acceptable look.

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Development Status: Open

Upvote 8 Downvote 0
guilherme.trem
14 Sep 2021

2 Comments

ManBlender

Check this. It's some support around, but maybe should be more helpful settings as default. Not sure. youtube.com/watch Eevee Shadows - Blender Tips and Tricks

Give some feedback if helped You.

guilherme.trem Author

I already messed around with Eevee a lot, and honestly, tutorials that use contact shadows are totally wrong, you can get perfect shadowing only messing with the Clip start and Bias.

Point is for VSM, is that the way the shadow map kinda "dilates" itself, so theres that really, really nice AO effect, shadows look anti aliased and got the softness value, which is not so helpful in many situations but if your shadows are pixelated you can use it to help

FIY : set shadow Bias to 0.001 and Clip start to 0.5m - 1m and you get the best shadow settings possible without the overrated terrible annoying contact shadows

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