Is there a way in the settings to avoid the blurry shadows?

[LazyTaco]

So this is what everything looks like in my game:

Indoor Shadows During the Day

Outdoor Shadows (Building-Casted)

Tree Shadows all appear realistic. There will be some diffusion in shadows cast through trees, just like irl, but for me, the tree shadow quality is consistent and not “grainy”…

Zoi In vs Out of the Tree-Casted Shadows

And here is her completely in the tree shadows

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I’m not seeing much of a large difference in any of these cases, other than some slight expected changes in the sharpness of the mesh because of how light reflection works.

Ramble:
Some of the cast shadows are “less sharp” on objects as they move across them, but I figure that’s because of the game processing light diffusion while in motion. Since swaying leaves are in motion, their shadows are constantly being rendered and may appear less sharp than stationary shadows. But it’s never so bad that it looks awful, or super grainy like yours, and it doesn’t significantly affect the meshes within their shadows…

The only time I see grainy hair or slight “ghosting” is when a Zoi or the camera is moving very quickly through areas with varying shadows, but once the motion stops/slows or I pause, and the processing finishes, it goes back to looking normal.

TDLR: I don’t see anything out of the ordinary in my game, and the visible changes are insignificant

[LazyTaco]

Also, adding on a little extra information (or I guess a fun fact) about how shadows work, so “sharp” isn’t generally confused as “good” and “blurry” isn’t confused as “bad.”

Even in real life, shadow sharpness varies with shape and motion:

• Flatter-edged shapes will naturally have harder and sharper shadows, while Curvier-Edged shapes will have softer and more diffused shadows (with some exceptions).
• Shadows in motion will appear blurrier, while stationary shadows appear sharper.

So, while comparing shadows in the game, be mindful of that.

The game generally does a good job of simulating these properties. As you can see, the round poles cast softer shadows, while the kiosk screen casts a sharper shadow. The stationary leaves of flowers and bushes are sharper than the moving leaves in trees.

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The graininess would be attributed to rendering “noise,” which is a processing issue.

[LazyTaco]

I just thought of something else that might improve the issue in your photos a little. If anything, it will improve your photo quality regardless. I never actually take photos with the Studio Mode Camera unless I absolutely have to.

What I do:

• 1st Choice (best quality):
  Stay in Normal Live Mode, Ctrl+Shift+U the UI away, set up the Camera how I want it, then Win+PrintScreen to take photos
• 2nd Choice (if I want a position, FOV, DOF, or effects, I can’t achieve with the normal viewport):
  Enter Camera Studio Mode, set it up exactly how I want it, and then Ctrl+Shift+U and Win+PrintScreen

But I never use that in-game “take photo” button because in-game photos for this game are massively compressed, on top of the quality automatically decreasing from Live Mode. You will always get the worst quality possible.

So, part of your issue might be the Studio Camera mode capabilities…

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Here are Comparison Photos:

1st Choice (Left) vs 2nd Choice (Right)

^You can clearly see how grainy the “Studio Camera > Hide UI > Print Screen” photo is in comparison to the “Live Default View > Hide UI > Print Screen” photo

1st Choice (Left) vs Camera Studio Button (Right)

^And the Camera Studio Button photo is even worse (more obvious in the comparison below)…

2nd Choice (Left) vs Camera Studio Button (Right)

^The difference is more subtle, but the quality is clearly more defined in the left photo.

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The file sizes also reflect this, with the camera button file size being significantly less than the Print Screen file sizes.

[LennyOgg]

Thank you so much for taking the time to test all this and help me through!
I learned a lot about the settings today and it will help me so much in the future
I think your screenshots are relatively equal to what I see in my game and the photo mode makes it even worse

I already noticed the quality in photo mode is not optimal and I have no idea why the mode for especially taking photos is worse than the actual gameplay -.-
Shouldn’t it be superior?
I really hope they will improve photo mode one day.

The main reason I still love/use it so much is because I can set the daylight to the time of the day/night I want/need it to (for story telling reasons and because I love to take pics with the sun in the optimal position, like shining in through the window), I just wish we had the full day there, there sadly is no sunrise (for whatever reasons -.-).
It’s also smoother to move the camera in photo mode.
Also scrolling in/out has more in between ‘steps’ - and all such stuff no one else cares for hahaha

[LazyTaco]

You’re welcome!

In response to your observations about the shadows, that’s why I pointed out that shadows vary irl just like they do in these photos, and the shadows I see are pretty realistic, including what you pointed out!

Technical Mumble:
The sharper shadows you see are from my Zois face, which is closer to her shoulder, while the softer shadows are from leaves farther away. Distance also plays a part in shadow sharpness (farther away from the object = blurrier/softer/more diffused). In fact, that’s probably why you noticed the tree shadows were different too.

Furthermore, in harsh/bright/hard light (1st pic you pointed out) vs softer light (2nd pic), those different types of shadows will be softer or sharper, just as you saw.

That being said, I don’t see these shadows as an “issue” or “bad vs good” shadows. They are accurate. Depending on how your system processes things, the difference in quality of these shadows can stand out even more (in a bad way) because there is more noise on top of that.

Most other games will basically do what movies do, where the lighting is automatically optimized for every scene with extra lights, but this is realistic lighting (unless you turn those settings off), so you have to actually account for that, or use the game’s BB lights you can buy and set places just like a photo set.

TLDR: What I was trying to show in those photos was that the hair quality and the “noise” are not significantly different across photos on my PC, not that shadows are exactly the same (because they wouldn’t be, realistically). The shadows behave as expected from a photographer and artist’s POV.

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For your second point, I think they didn’t want the photo file size to be too large because not only is the image file type a lossy format (jpg/jpeg), but the resolution is lowered from your computer screen’s resolution, which is why Print Screenshots are higher quality. Print Screenshots are PNG (lossless image file type) and use your screen’s full resolution.

If they had gone with PNG and full resolution, the photo quality would be better, but the file sizes would be significantly larger.

I hope that in the future, we can choose our image file quality and type.

[LennyOgg]

It’s super late here already and my brain is blurry from all the input, but I bookmarked this thread and will return!
And I tested something with the photos/screenshots.
Screenshots/photos of Mr Lunvik with a white background
(The bigger the File Size the better the quality?)

Results:

• ingame photomode
• CAZ photomode (taking a photo in CAZ has an even lower quality than in ingame photo mode(?))
• print key screenshot
• ALT-F1 screenshot (that’s an NVIDIA option afaik) = best quality(?)

Having my issues with the proper distance omg

How bad it really is I noticed when I took these screenshots
ingame photo mode:
(Somehow the difference is even more visible on my computer. Does the forum lower the size/quality of the pics? Edit: Ah, when you mouseover you see it. Makes this whole post kind of pointless hahaha)

Alt+F1

[LazyTaco]

Nice tests. The difference is so obvious I remember looking at my in-game Camera photos and thinking, “That’s not how I remember it looking…,” so I looked at the file type, and that’s when I realized I needed to start screenshotting instead.

Tomorrow, I’m gonna make a Tips & Guides post out of my earlier reply here about achieving better screenshots, because I feel like this is something more people would want to know.

Thanks for listening to my info rambles Lol… and let me know if anything else works or you figure things out.

[MinnieStell]

Wow, so big exchanges very useful here is it okay for you @LennyOgg ? Thanks for your share !

[Deniice]

The lights keep flickering outside in Cahaya, idk if this is only in Cahaya but this didn’t happen before the update.. it only happens outside the house and not in the house both day and night.

My settings didn’t change when downloading the December update so i think everything pretty much stayed the same.

I changed the video file into a gif, so this is how it looks like with the weird flickering light.

i also noticed that the graphic of the game got worser? Because inZOI looked really neat with the medium settings before but now it looks kinda down graded.

• • Game Version: v0.5.2

  • Platform: Steam Mac

  • Mods: never used

  • Hardware Specifications & Operating System (OS version, CPU, GPU, RAM, storage…): MacOS Sequoia, Apple M2, 16 GB

• Please provide the entire save file(s) from the date when the issue occurred.

  20251104-215849.zip (22.0 MB)

[JoyIsFunner]

Come-on devs at least fix the lighting issues to have a solid foundation

[Deys]

Hi Deniice

I’ve merged your post here as it’s linked to a known issue “When the Graphics - Preset option is set to “High” or “Ultra,” lights in Cahaya may flicker abnormally.”. This makes reports easier to track down.

Thank you for sharing!

[GreenDove]

before

now

before

now

before

now

It just looks like a deliberate downgrade, not a bug

[GreenDove]

(post deleted by author)

[redm]

Looks to me like the global illumination / skylight values got changed. Dark is no longer dark, all shadows seem to be washed out on these

[GreenDove]

I wanted to be sure, so I downloaded an older version of the game and compared side by side. Isn’t the graphics downgrade way too severe? The rain puddles are gone, rain effect are too weak, the whole village looks flat, and the colors are monotonous.