Lighting Issue Regarding Landscape and Foliage

Development Rendering
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1

I have been getting great interior lighting results for ArchViz like projects, but am currently failing in achieving even decent lighting on landscapes with foliage.
Hopefully someone can point me into the right direction or help me out if you maybe already have experience.

I have a big landscape (8kmx8km), it has materials on it and is full textured etc.
With dynamic lighting my landscape and grass with the grass layer looks really great.
However rendering all that takes up a huge amount of my GPU, so ofcourse performance isn’t all great on my GTX1080.
So I tried baking my scene instead, which meant I had to switch from the Grass Layer to the Foliage Tool, since Grass Layer doesn’t support static meshes/lighting.

I have a small patch of foliage to test out the lighting on my 8x8km landscape.
However the results are not at all what I want when I bake on medium quality.

I tried increasing the Landscape Static Lighting Resolution from 1 to 3 and even 16, but it seems to stop at 2. Increasing it beyond 2 does not make the tiles smaller in the Lightmap Density Debug View.

Can someone help me out with how to setup foliage in combination with static lighting on big landscapes?
Because I am trying to make this to be a massive map for multiplayer with mostly only foliage as assets that fill up the map.

Here are some screenshots of my results when baking, and an image of how it looked like with dynamic lighting of which is the result i wish to replicate.

As you can see in the Density Lightmap View, the terrain resolution is pretty small.
This is why I think my shadows are very blotchy.

So my question regarding “best practices” is;
Is it smart to increase the Landscape Static Lightmap Resolution?
Should I bake the lighting for all of my foliage, or does dynamic lighting only provide crips and clean shadows?
Having leaf shaders that make the foliage look wavy/windy, will this badly affect the static lighting in any way?

I am very new to landscapes and foliage, so any help is appreciated!

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2

One way to do it is to put the landscape right back down to 1 and then use a stationary directional light. In the details for that you can then set ‘shadow distance stationary light’ ( I think it’s called ).

Try about 1500 and see how it goes.

It basically bakes all the shadows but uses dynamic lighting around the player.

3

Thanks for replying.
But I don’t understand what you mean by “right back down to 1”.
Do you mean scaling the terrain down to 1mx1m?

4

No, put the Landscape Static Lighting Resolution right back down, because you don’t need it. The player is never near enough to see any blocky shadows.

( 1 might be a bit low, but 4 will defintely be ok. )

5

thanks when I get the time again i’ll test it out!

6

Roger that - it’s the best of both worlds. Static for everything except the bit near the player, which is what matters…

7

just an FYI.
I also posted this question on the answerhub, and people there were advised against using static lighting for foliage and big scenes like mine.

I played around with the shadow distance and grass distance. In a packaged build I got 45-70FPS in 1920x1080 on epic settings ofcourse.

So i’m happy with the performance results now. No static lighting, only cascaded shadows and distance field shadows.

The distance field shadows help out A LOT!