How to get rid of jittered/grainy shadows in Eevee Next (Blender 4.3 upwards)

Resources Tutorials, Tips and Tricks
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Hi,

Disclaimer: First of all, I’m not pretending to be a super-duper smart (I’m not even using use the word “clever” here) person when it comes to Blender, and maybe my solution is just a workaround and not the right solution at the same time, but been hanging around with Blender for some time I did find a way to get rid of those weird jittered/grainy shadows in so-called new Eevee Next render.

Anyway, here’s what you would need to do in order to increase your shadow quality in Blender 4.3 upwards in Eevee Next, and at the same time, get rid of those grainy weird shadow effects (or at least make them seen less noticeable to an eye).

  1. Check “Jittered Shadows” (step No. 1) right under Sampling → Viewport settings in Render Properties tab as seen in the screenshot No. 1.
    Screenshot No. 1 – Render Properties tab
    Screenshot No. 1 – Render Properties tab
    1.1 Increase the number of your samples to something like 128 or more for both Viewport/Render (step No. 2 and 2.1).
    1.2 In the Shadows subtab, increase your Resolution value all the way up to 1.000 and check Volume Shadows option by increasing its steps all the way up to 16 as well (step No. 3)

  2. Select your Light object in your Outliner tab (see screenshot No. 2), then switch to the Lighting tab (see screenshot No. 2.1),
    Screenshot No. 2 – Outliner
    Screenshot No. 2 – Outliner tab
    Screenshot No. 2.1 – Light object settings
    2.1 Screenshot No. 2.1 – Light object settings
    There, reduce the Radius value of your Light object to something like 0.001 (you can play with it in order to get a more suitable result), then check the “Soft Falloff” option as well, if it hasn’t been checked before.

  3. Here’s the final result you might get after all these tricks set and done:
    The final result
    Screenshot No. 3 – The final result

P. S. Thanks to @SeraphDesign777, we have found out that it also needs to turn on the Jitter Overblur option, and increase its value all the way up to 20% (some say it should stay at 0% to get better result, so you can play with this option as well), as shown in the screenshot below:

Jitter's Overblur option
Jitter's Overblur option340×505 25.8 KB

Screenshot No. 4 – The Jitter Overblur option

P. S. S. Actually, what I’ve written here was already covered in this one topic, but I thought that it’d be helpful to share it here with people, so others who run into this issue won’t have to dig through tons of threads to find the solution. Also, I have fixed some little issues here and there in order to make it even more better and understandable :slight_smile: .

Hope that helps,
Thanks, and have fun!

3 Likes
Smudgy Artifacts in Procedural Material with Bump/Displacement Nodes
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Thanks! I’m adding one thing:
If you get pixelated shadows when using an hdri, go into perspective view or camera view. It’s not technically caused by jittered shadows, but that’s what I thought it was.

ps the lighting drastically changes if you go into orthographic view.

1 Like
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Thanks for the feedback!

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4

Hi! I followed your tutorial and I’m still getting those ugly shadows:

image
image745×695 35.9 KB

It doesn’t seem like this method works well for curved objects. In your example, you only used a basic cube.

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Again, you’re not going to get the results you want with current Eevee Next, you can either wait for possible improvements to be possibly implemented or use your choice of vanilla Blender 4.1 or Goo Engine 4.1-4.4

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I’m sorry, but that’s not going to stop me from trying proposed solutions by people, and if they don’t work, I’m going to point it out. Save people the time trying it out for themselves.

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You’re completely free to keep trying things that aren’t going to work…… Joseph is offering you a solution to make the shadows look better, not telling you what you can’t talk about.

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Why am I the one being criticized for pointing out that a solution to a problem doesn’t work? Why hasn’t anyone else called out goorman for a method that clearly doesn’t work?

And I’m sorry, but I do not have the energy nor time to invest in trying a different fork of Blender right now. This proposed solution only took about 5 minutes to test, and I think it’s fair to let people know that it doesn’t work.

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Hi,

It wasn’t a proper solution, just a workaround. It if doesn’t work in your own case – that’s bad, but I didn’t test it with any other types of objects, it was just me snooping around through options here and there and trying this or that button. And when I got what I got, I enjoyed the result and decided to share here with people, that’s all.

Anyway, wish you a good time of day :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Goorman

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No one is criticizing you. None of this is personal in any way