I was asked to help with a Unreal project. That project has an issue with shadows from any tree. When the player is close to the shadow from that tree and moves around the shadow will change its shape. It becomes bigger or smaller depending on the direction you are looking.

Let me explain how trees are implemented. Each tree consists of a static mesh that represents branches and a static mesh that represents the canopy of the tree. Static mesh for the canopy has a material that replaces static mesh with many billboards that are leaves of the tree. It looks nice and easy to change because by changing the static mesh of the canopy you are changing the

Some time ago I did play with Unity and when I was searching for help, I always stumble on articles comparing Unity and Unreal Engine. And few days ago, I decided to check Unreal Engine 4.

Usually when I try to learn something new, I find some tutorial and follow it. And as you can imagine, at the beginning any tutorial will take a lot of time. And obviously it would be nice to save your work periodically, just to save time if everything will go wrong. Also, at the beginning you can press or click something without knowing what you did, and everything will go wrong, and you will spend enormous amount of time figuring it out.

As result