I’m looking for the UE equivalent of what’s called Shadow Linking in Arnold (and other traditional VFX renderers). It allows you to remove objects from shadows of specific lights. So if you have a character in a forest and a particular tree branch is creating a shadow from your key light on your character that you don’t want, you just link the branch to the light with shadow off and you don’t have to rotate your light to get rid of the shadow.
Unfortunately (for me) light channels default behavior is to cast shadows from objects not in the same light channel, even thought those objects aren’t illuminated. Sometimes that’s the desired effect, but in this case I don’t want that.
My lights are all movable and I’m not too concerned about render time since I’m using UE in a traditional VFX pipeline and not for anything close to real time.