Description
The Shadows Triggering Zones tool allows you to enable or disable shadow casting for specific lights, when you are inside a region. It works with lights and lights inside Blueprints.
You can check the performance comparison video: Youtube demo video
It’s complementary with our Dynamic lighting portal system tool. This one handles the shadows and the portal system handles lights visibility.
With this tool, you will be able to achieve the perfect performance optimization, having lights casting shadows only when necessary .
Very easy to setup ! Tutorial here: Youtube Tutorial
There is also an “inverse feature”, which allows you to disable shadow casting on the linked lights when the player is inside the region. This is extremely useful when you want to optimize a multi floor room for example.
You can have the lights on your floor casting shadows, and all the others ones with shadow casting disabled.
Depending on the number of lights affected, you can expect from 20 to 50% performance improvement in the rooms where you will use this system, making them playable on low end gaming computers (8 years old i7 950 processor and GTX 950 graphic card).
All that in “Epic” settings for everything except shadow (high)!
If you use dynamic lighting, You can get an even better performance boost when used with our Dynamic Lighting Portal System plugin
Technical Details
Code Modules:
Number of Blueprints: 1
Number of C++ Classes: 4
Network Replicated: No ( but works in multiplayer games as it’s local for each player )
Supported Development Platforms: win64
Supported Target Build Platforms: windows Linux Mac0s ( should work on any platform, we coudl’t test them, that’s all )
Documentation: Online Doc
Example Project: demo map in the plugin
Important/Additional Notes: this is for Dynamic Shadows Only
/! UE 5 info /!
due to the nature of Lumen, and lights affecting more than their default area, setting up the system may be harder in some cases
ChangleLog :
V1.1:
Fixed a build error for UE4.22
Added an option to hide editor buttons on the toolbar
V1.2:
Added support for Zone as Child actors
V1.3
QoL : Ability to have all shadow enabled in editor and system will init itself
Fixed issue related to begin play init
Supported Engine Versions
4.19 – 4.27, 5.0 – 5.3