Blender 3.x How to make EEVEE Shadows look AMAZING!!!

Seen a lot of videos on "How to make eevee look good!" and honestly... all of them are trash... sorry...

It seems like no one wants to put time into learning eevee, and the solution is always "use cycles"...

SO.... i want to make videos showing TRUELY how to make eevee look amazing! Starting with shadows...

I have yet to see a video show or talk about shadows in eevee... and the ones i do see, are... really bad... they only say to lower the light size to make crips shadows, and enable contact shadows... BOTH or which i think are bad/wrong answers... so, here is my workflow for getting Cycles quality shadows in eevee, in real time!

I also have tips for volumetrics, reflections, refractions, and lighting... Let me know if you want to see them... Thanks!

[pawprinting]

Why they are supposed to be used:



Contact shadows are a screen space effect (like most things in Eevee) and were meant to be a real time solution to make up for raytraced shadows. Your demonstration works great for simple objects but if you have a situation where meshes are closer together or have much finer detail (like for example thin pieces of mesh hair) then you'll quickly find out that the solution presented in this video starts to fall apart. And although you may be able to mitigate some of the issues by smoothing the shadows, things can get pretty jittery with quick or sudden camera movements from what I've noticed.

The other thing about cascades is that there are really large inconsistent blocks along the pixelated edges of the shadows which become much worse with distance. Sometimes these shadows just vanish completely and adjusting them means taking away from the resolution of other shadows on objects at closer proximity to the camera. This means that you have to keep adjusting the settings depending on the camera distance which can be tedious if your making a really big world environment. It may not be that much of an issue for interiors since youd be using mostly point lights but landscapes or outdoor scenes would be a HUGE hassle. Rendering at high resolution also does not resolve this problem.

Contact shadows smoothly fills in these spaces with little to no pixilation, but even then this is _still_ is a bad solution.



The major draw back to contact shadows is that whatever is not directly in view wont receive screen traces and this causes the shadowing to disappear in certain places. In the worst cases they will appear in weird angles or locations that are not physically accurate based on the model they are projecting from. Contact shadows are mostly based on approximation (a guessing game) and that's one of the major downsides to Eevee being a fully rasterization engine.



The shadows in cycles however are much better and always accurate because they are actually being raytraced as was also the case with blender internal. This is one of the main things that in my personal experience, kept me from moving to Blender 2.8. I do a lot of NPR based work, and when you need something to look like hand drawn art, the shadowing and shading aspects are crucial to this. It just has to appear like clean sharp line art.



Eevee works more like a game engine and that system usually benefits a lot from these cheap real time shadow solutions. But now we have real time raytracing and engines like UNREAL or UNITY can do raytraced shadows on the GPU. In the case of UE5 its even better since Epic's new feature uses software raytracing to achieve Virtual Shadow Maps.


Now supposedly the rewrites for EEVEE in 3.2 is going to introduce Virtual Shadow mapping which will be fantastic! This is probably the best news I've heard regarding blender in years. They had been saying for a while that they want to implement some form of raytracing into EEVEE and maybe this will correlate with their VSM solution. I dunno for sure but it would be great since Raytracing has become a very essential thing for real time graphics.

[goldenmikytlgp]

Is the SHADOW BIAS really the secret sauce? AND I HAD IT UNDER MY EYES THIS WHOLE TIME?!
My god..thank you my friend

[hardbeak]

thanks alot. I had a project and it just wasnt working out but your video helped me out alot.

[lavatr]

Fabulous...!!!!
Since i blew up my GPU Evee is the only option for doing Turntable animation

[IschbindeKalle]

So Bias lowest setting is 0.001 this 1 pixel sometimes doesnt connect every shadow to every object in the scene, and sometimes it even looks bad with bias at lowest. Thats where contact shadow can save your life.

[mrmensje]

Thank you so much for sharing that bias trick, it really is a game changer. I now first tweak that value and after that still use the contact shadows but at very low values so it wont look too crazyy.. contact shadows after all is a screenspaced effect sadly. Again thanks so much for sharing and helping others!

[CNVAIR]

Simple and working, excellent stuff, mate. Cheers!

[flxmerity]

Thx! is it possible for u to make a full tutorial on daytime lighting in eevee? im so bad at it, it would help me out so much

[mhonella]

Well done and thank you for the clear and concise tips. More videos like this would be great, especially in speeding up cycles. Do you have a link to where you got that grid layout for the plane?

[arthurlefevre]

Thanks a lot man, wish you luck with your jobs/channels.

[Mr.NBDY.D]

You will still get issues if you have a sunlamp entering a room if the sunlamp size is something that gives sharp shadows like 1° for example. I know this because I found this video trying to solve the shadows of a living room scene I'm working on in Eevee. The settings used here are my defaults 4k shadows with bias to the lowest setting. The issue I have is when an object cast's a shadow onto a distant object the resolution of that shadow is lower than if it was casting shadows onto a close surface like the floor beneath the cube. Contact shadows improve the ambient occlusion between two objects in contact or close together. I always have contact shadows on but the default settings look bad for because the distance value is too low. Adjust bias and thickness as needed. It creates better ambient occlusion

[sojh]

Holy shit this saved my ass. I could not figure out why my shadows were so jank for days

[yorchmr]

subed, thank for being o direct, i'd totally love more of this, i like to show my prop models with eevee sometimes and i'd like to up the quality

[buddhasinger]

Useful advice! Thank you. I use contact shadows, if I wont to make white colored text more visible on image backgroung. Just a littlebit.

[MILITIAKZ]

Great video! I liked the background with metric markings, I would like to know how to do it

[IoVideoMaker]

thanks for the tutorial! it worked for me!

[othoapproto]

I only see eevee as a preview tool during modeling. My clients would never except eevee as a final.

[IamSHVA]

Thanks, shadows improved by a lot in my scene.. 🙏
Now, I don’t have to render in cycles & waste heck a lot time.

[kbee]

You are so cool. This was so comprehensive!

[pelmen]

Well, for me, at first time while using upbge 0.3 i didn't notice that contact shadow issue, because i was staring at one direction, so maybe the contact shadows are for fast and one directional rendering