Handling top down lighting and shadows

[dawn kraken]

Hey there! I am creating a game with quite a lot of dynamic objects which is also top down. I am having problems as the shadows appear very pixelated as I have to set the shadow distance to very high values.
I have other scenes that the distance from the scene is much closer which makes the shadows to stand out more...

Has anyone thought of any solution? I can increase shadow resolution by a lot but I feel this is a cheap trick right now... Thanks!

I have got some recommendations on faking the shadows, but I don't know much about how to do that

[lunar shoal]

What type of light is projecting the shadow ?

[dawn kraken]

I only have 1 directional light, the main problem is that as the camera is very far away (top down view) I have to put a very large distance for shadows to appear (60-70 meters)

How games like Boomerang Fu or Overcooked2 handle this problem?

[cobalt shuttle]

make sure you have Soft Shadows Quality on high

[lunar shoal]

The directional light shadow is projected around the camera and takes in account the camera far plane as well as the shadow distance.
But it turns out quite a lot of the shadow map space can seem unused.

You can try to tweak the camera far plane to better match the viewing distance and help cull the shadows to a narrower view, or tweak the cascade shadows distances.

And other option is to have full controll over the shadow and replace the directional light with a spot light that is far away with a small projection angle : it will mimic the parallel look of the a directional light, but you can freely place it exactly where the camera is pointing and you'll max out the shadow usage.

[dawn kraken]

I will see if this works :3 thank you

[dawn kraken]

Soft shadows can also help with that!

[dawn kraken]

Spotlight does not work... But the camera far plane seems doing something