not sure what's going on here so I'm not sure what to search for, but if anyone could point me in the right direction to clear up the artifacts on my surface (A somewhat large solid) as well as the light leaking underneath my fence piece which is pushed into the ground.

You can 'fix' this shadow bleeding using the command

e_GsmRange
Size of LOD 0 GSM area (in meters)

The smaller the more precise close range shadows get.

I'ma just post in here cause I'm having a similar problem.



So although the shadows get sharper, I still have a "gap" between the object and the shadow. The chair with the missing material for instance is actually on the floor. There's also no gap between the wall and floor.

This worked for me:
http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?f=326&t=82917

This problem comes from the shadow bias, I'm not sure but I believe you can tweak the shadow bias and shadow slope bias, make a search in the console variables. (Double click in the console input box)

Hopefully in the next release of the build, you'll have a new option in the time of day editor that will allow you to tweak the low, medium and high distance shadow bias.

Thanks for the help Helder.

Instead of making yet another thread I thought I'd use this one seeing as it's light related. I have a plane with a texture for railings, I can use the "Maintain AlphaTest coverage in mipmaps" to ensure that at a distance the opacity still holds up. However, the shadows on the floor get affected at a distance, almost like they're reading mipmapped opacity. How can I improve/turn that off. It's only for one asset so shouldn't affect the game that much.

wow HP = Helder Pinto... cool! I enjoyed your Eat 3d cryEngine tutorials, nice work ;-)

This is well known issue of all shadow maps in all engines.
Simply speaking.. learn to live with it.
Yes you can tweak gsm vars, but this will trade for low range shadows, and/or low quality shadows on higher distances or strange transitions between lods. IMO is not worth it. I wasted 5h for tweaking this var, and ultimetly gone back to default settings ;p.

If you have DX11 graphics card, you look for GS something (geometry shader shadow generation), and see if using this will fix your problem. As those are variation of stencil shadows.

That was all super-useful, a lot of stuff to research about all that. Thanks for the help iniside!