Need Some Serious Help With Foliage and Lighting

Development Rendering
1

So I’ve got to a place where I’m happy with the lights but I’ve got two major issues.

No 1.

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I have a a stationary light for my directional light , and a stationary light for my skylight. The trees were added with the foliage tool and are set to static. The door and the bench are movable and need to be moved inside the environment. As you can see they light up like a Christmas tree. I’m assuming this is because of the static trees and movable meshes. I’ve tried setting the trees to movable but it will cause the fps to dip dramatically and gives some undesirable results overall. Does anyone have an easy fix so that the meshes can move without being lit up? Perhaps another movable spot light? …which brings me onto my next issue

No 2.

This is a puzzle survival horror game, so naturally its somewhat dark and we give the player a torch. However, the moveable light attached to the torch inside the forest causes a HUGE fps drop. It will take my fps from 60fps to 15 fps in seconds of turning it on. I’m starting to hate foliage and I have no clue what I’m doing wrong. They all have LODs and will billboard at a distance and a cull distance, any advice?

2

Hmm, could be a few different things, What is the intensity for both lights? Maybe try turning down the intensity of the direct light and increasing the ambient light? It might be that your trees base color is too dark or your bench color is too light? Try and stick with using those two lights, I wouldn’t recommend adding a movable spot light, it will only hurt the performance more.

No2. First try decreasing the attenuation radius of the torch so that it’s not affecting alot of assets, if that doesnt do much then try turning the dynamic shadows off for the torch light, that will help performance alot but at the cost of loosing shadows.