Capsule Shadows
Capsule shadows approximate a character's shape using simple capsule primitives instead of tracing its full animated mesh for this indirect-shadow contribution. They help ground a moving character in baked or diffuse lighting, where a conventional direct-light shadow alone may not describe the surrounding illumination.
Spectral uses the baked probe field to guide that indirect shadow's direction and response. As the character moves through the field, it can sample different lighting, but the underlying illumination remains baked. This is an approximation, not a replacement for accurate direct shadows or an update to the bake itself.
Features > Capsule Shadows configures this integration. It requires an existing capsule-shadow setup; it does not create collision capsules, assign a shadow physics asset, or configure the character for you. The probe integration requires desktop deferred, non-stereo rendering; see the platform matrix.
Settings belong to the level and update live. Save the level after changes.
Use Probe Capsule Lighting
Default: disabled.
Enables the probe-driven capsule-lighting integration. The character needs a valid capsule-shadow setup, and the region needs baked probe coverage.
This switch is independent of Use Probe Fog Lighting. Enabling fog lighting does not enable capsule lighting.
Capsule Shadow Direction Modes
Default: Unreal Stock. Available while Use Probe Capsule Lighting is enabled.
Unreal Stock
Retains the stock direction mode. Use it as a baseline when comparing the probe-driven alternatives, rather than assuming every enabled configuration must look different.
Realistic
Estimates direction, spread, and strength from the probe lighting. It follows the stored lighting field rather than always pushing the shadow toward the ground.
The quality of that direction depends on the baked field. Increasing a runtime control cannot recover directional information lost to sparse sampling or a deliberately uniform probe bake.
Grounded
Adds a ground-directed bias to the probe-driven result. This is useful when a readable grounding shadow is more important than following the sampled light direction exactly.
Forced Ground Amount
Default: 1. Range: 0 to 1. Only available in Grounded mode.
Sets the strength of the grounding bias. 0 keeps the sampled direction; 1 applies the full grounding bias. Intermediate values blend the behavior.
This is not a general shadow-opacity slider. If the direction is correct but the character's whole capsule shadow is wrong, inspect its native capsule-shadow setup as well.
Changing the mode or grounding amount needs no bake. Changing the lights or the probe data feeding the effect does.
See Testing capsule lighting for a setup checklist.