Just a quick idea for getting some ambient shadows from trees onto the ground / surrounding static meshes without needing to bake lightmaps for the hundreds or thousands you might have in your level or without DFAO.
Tree groupings from left to right -
- Static meshes all with lightmaps
- Dynamic meshes (no baked lighting)
- Dynamic meshes with a invisible shadow casting mesh
And here’s the shadow casting mesh -
I laid out the trees in the editor then exported them as an fbx file into maya where I fit a plane mesh to the canopy of the tree groupings. I then added the plane mesh into the level as a static mesh, disabled the mesh visibility, and built the lighting.
Results aren’t perfect but it’s better than having zero ambient shadowing like in the second grouping of trees. If you spent a bit more time on the canopy shadowing casting mesh you could probably get a bit better results as well.