What are these weird shadows?

Have your graphic card drivers been updated?

Weird, make a backup of the options.ini file and try deleting it? This will reset your in game-settings. Try reinstalling your graphics card drivers too.

"CK213;c-17885220" wrote:
Have your graphic card drivers been updated?

Yes, I updated yesterday.

"logion;c-17885249" wrote:
Weird, make a backup of the options.ini file and try deleting it? This will reset your in game-settings. Try reinstalling your graphics card drivers too.

I'll give this a try.

That's the shadow plane for that part of the mesh, anything that uses an alpha type texture, ie: plant leaves, go on a flat square plane with the background transparent, allowing only the plant leaf (or in the case of your radio the antenna) but the game casts shadows on the shape of a mesh, so it's using the shape of the plane that the texture is on to cast that shadow on the wall.

As a creator, I normally remove my plant from my mesh before creating the shadow LOD so that way it doesn't cast a shadow for the plane that the plant texture is on.

MESH SHAPE
https://i.imgur.com/7BG8lB5.png

MESH TEXTURED WITHOUT ALPHA
https://i.imgur.com/bEq0KwW.png

MESH TEXTURED WITH ALPHA (How you see it in the game)
https://i.imgur.com/gzXtdpj.png

"Chicklet453681;c-17885374" wrote:
That's the shadow plane for that part of the mesh, anything that uses an alpha type texture, ie: plant leaves, go on a flat square plane with the background transparent, allowing only the plant leaf (or in the case of your radio the antenna) but the game casts shadows on the shape of a mesh, so it's using the shape of the plane that the texture is on to cast that shadow on the wall.

As a creator, I normally remove my plant from my mesh before creating the shadow LOD so that way it doesn't cast a shadow for the plane that the plant texture is on.

MESH SHAPE
https://i.imgur.com/7BG8lB5.png

MESH TEXTURED WITHOUT ALPHA
https://i.imgur.com/bEq0KwW.png

MESH TEXTURED WITH ALPHA (How you see it in the game)
https://i.imgur.com/gzXtdpj.png

So is this just part of the vanilla game and it happens for everyone? I had a mod to remove it off cc, but I never noticed it on maxis meshes before now.

Yes everybody will see it in their game if EA made the shadow LOD including the mesh plane part that the plant texture is placed.

The only way I know of how to remove that is to physically remove that part of the mesh and create a new shadow LOD.

As you pull the mesh further away from the wall it lessens in intensity.

It could be part of a shadow mesh issue, but to me it looks like it's to do with SSAO (which is ambient occlusion - part of the lighting settings).

You can turn that off by editing the game's graphic rules, which is a settings file. Here's how:

Navigate to your game's Origin installation directory (not the folder where you have saves, mods, screenshots, etc). For me, on a Windows 10 PC, it's here:

Program Files (x86)/Origin Games/The Sims 4/Game/Bin

In this folder, there's a file called GraphicRules.sgr. You should copy that to somewhere safe on your computer before you make any changes to it, just in case!

You can open the rules file with pretty much any text editor (my computer defaults to Notepad) and do a search for "SsaoEnabled". The game sets whether SSAO is enabled or not for each lighting quality, from low to very high, so you can either change all of them or just change the one that matches the light setting you use in game. For example, I use very high, so I find the "SsaoEnabled" line under "setting $VeryHigh".

Next to "SsaoEnabled", it says true. Change that to false, save your file, and you're good to go.

If this is what's going on in your game, I hope this helps :smile:

"bizuktag;c-17885620" wrote:
It could be part of a shadow mesh issue, but to me it looks like it's to do with SSAO (which is ambient occlusion - part of the lighting settings).

You can turn that off by editing the game's graphic rules, which is a settings file. Here's how:

Navigate to your game's Origin installation directory (not the folder where you have saves, mods, screenshots, etc). For me, on a Windows 10 PC, it's here:

Program Files (x86)/Origin Games/The Sims 4/Game/Bin

In this folder, there's a file called GraphicRules.sgr. You should copy that to somewhere safe on your computer before you make any changes to it, just in case!

You can open the rules file with pretty much any text editor (my computer defaults to Notepad) and do a search for "SsaoEnabled". The game sets whether SSAO is enabled or not for each lighting quality, from low to very high, so you can either change all of them or just change the one that matches the light setting you use in game. For example, I use very high, so I find the "SsaoEnabled" line under "setting $VeryHigh".

Next to "SsaoEnabled", it says true. Change that to false, save your file, and you're good to go.

If this is what's going on in your game, I hope this helps :smile:

@bizuktag - this was it, thank you!

@Mstybl95 Cool, glad to hear it worked for you!