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#2294 Compositor shadow lod transition
The compositor shadow seems to have some sort of LOD.
The transision between the lod levels is at times bad as it creates a gap between the lower and higher res shadow, which is lit by the sun.
As well, it would be nice to have props to change the lod distance of the shadow.
Already reported in Discord -- good to see it's not just me!
I have (finally) been able to reproduce this, and it has to do with the aircraft size. ALS currently uses 4 shadow mapping cascades. The first two are generally intended to belong to the aircraft (1st for the cockpit and 2nd for the whole aircraft), and the other two for the scenery. The change in quality between the 2nd and the 3rd cascade is very big, but it's usually not noticeable because the entire aircraft is usually covered by the 2nd cascade. The A320, and airliners in general, slip into the 3rd cascade.
I haven't found a satisfactory way of dealing with this. If we increase the area covered by the 2nd shadow cascade, small planes' shadows have worse quality. If we leave it as it is, bigger planes's shadows can disappear entirely at certain view angles Jonathan showed.
My proposal would to expose the 2nd and 3rd cascade boundary distance (in meters) so aircraft developers can configure it to match their plane wingspan + a few more meters (something like a spherical bounding box around the aircraft). How does that sound?
Sounds good.
Not sure tho, if that solves the gap, between the shadow cascades, when the aircraft shadow gets near the shadow of a building.
It should, but I'll check anyway. I'll try pushing the fix to next as soon as possible so we can test more extreme cases (big airliners or even the Shuttle).