Long Range Smooth Shadows - (Good with Dynamic Performance)

A settings guide for long range shadows, a smooth and unnoticable shadow LOD transition, and to make shadows soft to reduce blocky shadows on close characters.

About:

I noticed that shadow LODs pop in when approaching, which can look pretty jarring against a very visible background like for porch shadows against a white house. I wanted to fix that and also have shadows on objects very far away. I tweaked the shadow setting until I found what I feel is a nice balance between no LOD popup, long range shadows, and shadow detail. The max shadow range is the closest that the default uGrids should show terrain objects and fade in nicely, 270 meters.

The trade off is that the shadows are a little more blurry and not as detailed up close, but as graphics programmers have told me it's always a tradeoff with shadow settings and the best you can get is a good balance. :) Just imagine there are some clouds scattering the light so you don't have perfectly sharp shadows, just like on real cloudy days. :D

Shadows are performance demanding, so ShadowBoost Dynamic Performance Tuner and Load Accelerator works great for this because you can have long range shadows in the wide wasteland where you get good performance, and when you get into an FPS demanding area like a city, which usually has reduced visibility, then the shadow range drops down to gain performance. The close shadow range is what should look good in cities and have good performance, 30 meters.

Settings:

1. It's recommended to use ShadowBoost Dynamic Performance Tuner and Load Accelerator because shadows are very resource intensive the more there are, and long range shadows have a lot more than normal settings. Dynamic Performance Tuner and Load Accelerator is not required if you have a really powerful system. You might also want an ENB or fraps for fps checking to tweak the fps setting. I use the performance ENB.

2. Backup your files so you can undo the changes if you don't like them.

Fallout4Prefs.ini in \Documents\My Games\Fallout4\

ShadowBoost.ini in the Fallout 4 .exe folder.

3. Edit Fallout4Prefs.ini, make sure that there aren't duplicate lines in your file, delete/comment out your old settings:

; long range smooth shadows

fDirShadowDistance=27000. 0000

fShadowDistance=5000. 0000

iShadowMapResolution=1024

iDirShadowSplits=3

fBlendSplitDirShadow=600. 0000

uiOrthoShadowFilter=3

4. If using Dynamic Performance Tuner and Load Accelerator, edit the .ini with similar settings, and tweak to what works for your system:

fShadowDrawDistMin=3000. 0

fShadowDrawDistMax=27000. 0

5. If your settings are correct, then you should see longer range shadows in game.

Known issues