When camera.lens.far is set to large number,
shadow is rendered wired.
It’s look like a very large pixel.

as attached image,
lens.far = 5000 is left side,
lens.far = 50000 is right side.

Welcome to the world of shadow maps!

I assume they use the view’s camera projection matrix (“lens”) to render shadows. That is of course not right and should be fixed. You should be looking forward to cascaded shadow maps.

EDIT: General / simple explanation: In order to get an even distribution of shadow samples along all axes, a cubic volume of the scene is rendered with orthographic projection. Now, the greater you set the depth of that imaginary cube, the more the shadow samples get stretched along the scene, because the shadow map has still the same size in texels.

The only problem I see here, is that you apparently set the lens parameters of your camera, but that should not really have an effect on the shadow maps, because the lights should have a radius, which should control that.

I guess you should file a bug report or feature request.

Best regards.

Its really bad having to work around this.
It almost forces you to make your models at a scale so you end up with the result you would like.
I hope this gets changed, so we can control it by ourselves.

Anyone knows if this is fixed on Gold version?
I just want to have quality shadows for one single character in the scene and can’t reduce camera.lens.far anymore. Is there any workaround to have quality shadows only for one object? or maybe set another camera with lower lens.far and use it to render shadows?

Gold is the same.
I managed to hack together something that works in situations where the camera is following closely to something and you have a large scene/far.
In directionalShadowMapper there is
var corners : Vector.<Number> = _frustumCorners
Thats pulled from the camera lens.
So I created another frustrum for the lens for a shadow and reduced the far values.
Worked for what I needed.

I’m going to bump this and ask…

Is there a way yet to control the quality of shadows for directional lights that doesn’t require scaling the whole scene just to fit the shadows?  Maybe a shadow map texture resolution or similar?  I’m working with the latest 4.1 dev code.

Have you tried NearShadowMapMethod? It gives better results if you have a big scene and want your main character to have nice and smooth shadows. Basically instead of reducing lens.far you can reduce shadow coverage.