Hello! I’m doing a scene with cell shading and I want the shadows to be clean and sharp, but certain areas of my render are getting fuzzy, jagged shadows:
I tried researching how to get sharp shadows in EEVEE, and I’ve tried things like turning the rays and steps down to 1 like I found online:
I also tried messing with different lights and their settings like trying point lights, sun lights, and area lights.
I can’t find anything specifically for EEVEE Next since that revamped basically all the previous lighting settings. I’m not really sure what else to try. Oh, and I should mention that all the materials are using toon shaders as well. Does anyone here know how to get clean, solid shadows using EEVEE Next?
Is there anything particular with the materials of the house that would cause it to receive shadows differently from the ground? Anything fancy with transparency or reflections? What if you remove the material?
Or maybe the angle of the light is causing the shadows to get stretched on those surfaces in such a way the pixels becomes highly noticeable?
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Eevee cannot truly produce perfectly sharp shadows. Its shadows are made using shadow maps, which are textures made of pixels. If you make them perfectly sharp, the pixels will become visible. Usually, it relies on the shadows being slightly soft to filter and hide that pixellation.
Having perfectly pixel sharp shadows requires them to be generated to exactly match the render’s pixels, so true raytracing. That’s why only Cycles can do it.
Rays and steps are only quality settings, they don’t affect shadow sharpness. Only the light’s radius and shadow resolution do.
Rays affect the noise level in soft shadows, and steps affect the amount of light leaks in soft shadows. Neither will make a visible difference in your case, though they may render faster if you turn them down.
Old Eevee couldn’t do perfectly sharp shadows either, for similar reasons.
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In conclusion, the easiest thing would be to allow a very small amount of softness.
If the hard look is really important, some other way of rendering the scene would have to be used.
I think I might have an idea why that would be the case.
Eevee next uses a different shadow algorithm, where the resolution changes depending on the camera’s distance (a bit like the old cascaded shadows, but for all types of lamps).
This is good for performance and will in theory allow for finer resolutions, but it will also put a ceiling on the sharpness, because the quality will drop with distance. If the sharpness wasn’t perfect from up close, it won’t be either in the distance, as the quality drops to maintain the same detail level everywhere on screen.
Meanwhile, old Eevee has fixed resolution for every light type except sun, which means a shadow viewed from far away will look increasingly sharper as its texels becomes smaller on screen.
Adjusting a sun angle and hoping you’re happy with the result is about the best you can do in Eevee Next. Your other option is to use a very small focal length; the larger the focal length, the worse the shadow jaggies get.
Point lights don’t suffer from this, like parallels do.
If you’d like to add your vote, here’s a related request:
It’s not just the sun light that’s causing it: it’s every type of light for me. The lighting setup I have for my scene is using area lights, for example. It’s definitely annoying that EEVEE Next has issues with basic stuff like this, though.
