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JaySimTrip
New Participant
March 6, 2025

Distance Field shadows / Far shadows

  • March 6, 2025
  • 5 replies
  • 874 views

Hi

I'm developing a simple VR flight simulator for Meta Quest 3 in UE 5.5.

There is an issue I've been struggling with for the last couple of week and I really need some help before I lose my marbles.

Basically, I'm trying to get a half decent shadows (near and far) to show in Quest 3 standalone apk. For some reason though, no matter what I do, only the Cascaded Shadow Map shadows work.

The issue with CSM is that it looses all the close up detail if the range is set to a larger distance.

My sceene uses a single Stationary Directional Light (Sun) and only one dynamic actor (player pawn).

Rest of the sceene is static with baked lighting.

The goal is to have a cascaded shadows, set to a low distance (1000) so it draws detail crisp shadow inside the cockpit and on the landscape when sitting on the ground. So far so good, this works well.

When airborne however, (past the 1000), I need to switch to either "Far shadows" or "Distance Field shadows".

Although it all works correctly in the edittor, I can't package and deploy the apk. on the Quest with the same looks.

I must have tried every possible setting, tick box and cvar, but something, along the chain just disables the Distance Field / Far shadows and it drives me nuts.

Did anybody managed to use Distance Fields or Far Shadows on the platform please?

I'll buy a beer to anyone who can help:)

Thanks

Jay

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    5 replies

    kutlaytunc
    kutlaytunc
    Inspiring
    March 7, 2025

    -Distance Field Shadows do not work on Quest 3 because it doesn't support them. It appears in the editor but not in packaged build.(Edit: In this project it shows that we can use distance field shadows as baked shadows.)
    -Far Shadows only works for static objects. It doesn't on dynamic actors.
    -Virtual Shadow Maps are not supported on Quest 3.
    -For CSM you can improve sharpness:
    r.Shadow.CSM.TransitionScale 0.1
    r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades 4
    r.Shadow.CSM.DepthBias 5

    You can try contact shadows option on directional light.

    I'm developing on MR so I didn't use those in a while, I hope it helps.

    JaySimTripAuthor
    New Participant
    March 9, 2025

    Thank you for chipping in.

    Unfortunately, none of those suggestions make too much of a difference for me.

    How do you know that "Distance Field Shadows do not work on Quest 3 because it doesn't support them"?

    I mean, where do you find what Quest 3 is capable of? I searched far and wide, but there was very little I could find.

     

     

    kutlaytunc
    kutlaytunc
    Inspiring
    March 9, 2025

    I'm sorry about it, as I've said it before it's been a long time that i tweaked that settings, here is the sample project link for you, it works as baked: https://developers.meta.com/horizon/documentation/unreal/unreal-samples/#distance-field-baked-shadows-map

    I will edit out that part on my original reply.

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