Hello,
I’m having issues with lighting in my test scene. Basically I have some plants on my landscape, and when I built lights they started looking like this:
As you can see there are shadows where there shouldn’t be, foliage is semi-transparent so it should let some light through. Any Idea about how to fix this?
Any advice will be appreciated, thanks in advance.
I think about two things you could verify :
Or, it’s something else ^^
Hello @JoGoiA, thanks for your reply.
I checked my UVs (I use blender) and actually they are overlapping I think, basically some leaves have the same UVs since they’re just duplicated and rotated inside Blender. Checking into the mesh properties anyway I see that in Channel 1 the UVs are all separated, maybe UE4 did it on his own, so I don’t think this is the problem. Today I tried to set the directional light to movable, then the foliage was nice shaded as you can see in this picture:
Then I decided to set the directional light back to stationary and the result was this:
As you can see the shadows are darker and (in my opinion, but it could be just personal preference) they don’t look natural at all. Also, “cast shadows as masked” was already unchecked. I don’t know what to do anymore 
Any help will be appreciated, thanks in advance.
ok ^^
Yes, UE4 build convenient (but often poorly optimized) UV in channel 1 for the lightmap.
In fact, your problem is that the shadows are too dark when rendered with static light.
Then it’s a render problem but I can’t help much here…
I would look at the global illumination in the post process but I’m working with dynamic lights…
… or something in the indirect lighting of your light detail panel…
I hope some lighting specialist with pop in the discussion to give you more accurate advices 
I’ve start to watch these videos and learn a lot on the lighting system in UE4 (but never use that knowledge yet ^^) : “lighting academy” from a talented guy named [MENTION]54Daedalus[/MENTION].
I found that at least I my self used to set my Skylight intensity too low when I first started doing foliage stuff. Right now I’m at about 10 Intensity for the skylight and 20 intensity for the directional light for mid day scenes. Also make sure to adjust the Skylight’s horizon color, make it greenish or something that will help too. Then adjust your Postprocess’s tone mapper to compensate for any leftover dark areas. Those three things helped me become a happy forest ranger 
Thanks both @JoGoiA and @MischievousM for your replies, I’ll check out your solutions to see if I can get my foliage to look nice. I also started to watch the tutorials JoGoiA suggested and I have to say they’re pretty interesting.
Have a nice evening!