The problem with DFAO and any kind of distance field/dynamic solution is that I would have to sacrifice both GI lighting and perf as well as excluding a chunk of people who don’t have the hardware required to render distance fields. Other problems revolve around the fact that many of Unreals lighting features rely heavily on Temporal AA which limits me further.
Baking lightmaps in this massive scene right now only takes about 5 minutes on my machine which is a fair trade-off for the image quality and perf I get back.
Using dynamic lighting also does not address the issue the issue, which is that foliage with lightmaps does not seem to be working correctly/as expected.