Does anyone have an idea about why this happens with the shadows in Eevee?
Looks the same in viewport and final render. The shadow cube size in the eevee settings does affect the size/smooothness of that artifact, but it’s still always there. The size of the artifact also correlates with the amount of shadow softness the light has.
Here’s a render with a 2048px shadow cube size:
Always attach .blend files if you want other people to investigate something weird. Pictures are not enough.
Well, I’m not sure why exactly there’s a border around the window, but it has to do with the Softness setting and the filtering.
Probably a good idea to report this as a bug once the tracker is open to bug reports for things other than crashes. Though there’s a good chance it will just wind up as a ‘won’t fix’.
It is an artifact of ESM. Try changing to VSM shadow type. But it also comes with artifacts, but not the same.
Do you plan to add optional raytraced shadows for best quality? I feel like shadows cause most artifacts and require a lot of tweaking. Contact shadows are already raytraced, aren’t they?
Contact shadows are ScreenSpace raytraced so not really artifact free at all.
Real raytraced shadows are not there yet… at all. And I wouldn’t mention them in my roadmap for Eevee as they are really far away (we would need vulkan backend and a lot of other additions).
Or we would have to write our own raytracing solution and it would be quite slow.
And believe me, I hate shadow maps.
Yes shadows in EEVEE are not good, for example using bigger world, shadows (with a bit soft) on smaller objects are very soft and on bigger objects like trees are very sharp. it would be nice if we have better shadows (even it is slower) there are numerous techniques
HRTS (Hybrid Ray Traced Shadow)
It seems that shadows is complicated in real time engines.
Here in the forum we had mentioned before about similar problems caused by Softness in lamp:
Eevee Shadows artifacts v1.blend (1014.6 KB)
So, someone has found some correct settings to avoid artifacts in this scene?
Here I have found a workaround just for the window, placing a transparent plane. I’m not sure if this is really useful:
eevee_shadow_artifact workaround.blend (631.3 KB)
Hey, that’s good to know! What settings did you use for the transparent plane material? The only way I got it to work was to set the “transparent shadow” to opaque, but then the window hole obviously wouldn’t show in the shadow.
edit: whoops, I see you included the .blend. So yeah, opaque it is 
Well that’d be an acceptable trade-off in many cases.
this is a temporary workaround, but not good for more complex scenes, very time consuming and may result some errors
The awesome new soft shadow option solves this problem 
You just have to set the softness of the lamp to 0, and set the radius to an appropriate value.
Obviously it increases render times and maybe isn’t good for every situation, but I know I’ll be using these soft shadows a LOT anyways!
@hypersomniac Really glad you check this forum thread
Eevee is incredible and is a big leap forward for Blender, thank you very much for it!
Do you think it could be feasible to reach the Unity shadows quality in Eevee?
Especially with sun lights, and sunset, long shadows. It seems Eevee can’t render sharp shadows, they’re always a little jagged and blurry, even with 4096 resolution.
I have no idea of the technical concerns behind this (all I know is they both use cascaded shadow maps), maybe the two engines are totally different and it would be a hassle to get it working. But that would be really awesome, if there are any chances for it.
[EDIT] Actually, this message can be ignored. After more trials, It seems Unity shadows have their drawbacks too, and tweaking the Eevee shadows parameters can greatly improve the result. Not perfect, but we probably can’t have better with shadow maps.
It’s still in alpha, so I wouldn’t expect it to be perfect quite yet.
Though from my recent experiments, it does seem to be that the shadow quality varies greatly upon the distance of the camera from the object casting shadows. In the scene I’ve been playing around with, I’ve got a few details that cast small shadows in the nooks of my object. From far away, they produce a sloppy sawtooth effect, not entirely dissimilar to what’s in your picture. It looks terrible, and no amount of tweaking can manage to fix it. If I zoom in on it, I’ll see them resolve themselves into crispier, crunchier shadows the closer I get.
In general, I find Eevee works better on larger objects than it does smaller ones at the moment.
I assume you’re using a sun lamp. Those are called cascaded shadow maps and they’re working as intended. If you want cleaner shadows, adjust the number of cascades or the blending.
