Lightmaps + Foliage + UV's ANY TIPS?

HI, so I’m working on a project where I am testing some foliage. I came up with a nice lightweight way to use cinema 4d’s hair function to build nice, lightweight multi-branching trees with polygons and smoothing on the trunks. I can use these meshes with the foliage tools perfectly and the results look great, however the problem I have with importing a lot of irregular objects from c4d with ‘effector’ style generative effects is that they have awful UV layouts. I have done, force compute normals and importing with different ‘phong tag’ smoothing groups etc. but for objects like these can’t quite fix the lighting build errors. Here is where the problem comes in >> I decided instead to not run these at all with the static lighting builds, have had shadows/ generate lightmap UV’s = off etc. but it still seems everytime i do a lighting build they run through, thousands of instances of the foliage and come up overlapping errors. CAN I just exclude them from being looked at in the build?( I thought I checked off everything I could find, and honestly they dont need drama shadows…but…) Any general tips for dealing with weird/generative/ irregular geometry coming in from c4d?

I can’t speak for anything C4D related since I’ve never used it, but if you want any of the Foliage to not be used with Static Lighting builds you can disable the option for “Cast Static Shadow” by unchecking the checkbox. Your meshes painted with the foliage tool will now only use any Dynamic lighting in the scene.

I’m still finding that the foliage meshes are touchy, I had them working after fixing the UV’s in C4ds bp/paint UV editor which is great, at lightmap resolution 64. But after adding a few more it started giving me the error in yellow lightmaps size too large for instanced actor - after lowering the lightmap resolution they go back to having overlap problems … ive had them set to cast no shadows the whole time though? Its not a huge problem at this point, I really just want to see how much can run and at what level on a laptop but as I’m planning to go all the way with this project, the building which works, then doesnt its getting to be a problem. Also the UV’s are only overlapping by 5.6%