UE 5.7 – Foliage/Grass materials look extremely dark on the unlit side and bad lighting consistency

[HorizonNK]

Hei!

I’m using Unreal Engine 5.7 and I’m having serious problems with grass, foliage and lighting.

The grass/foliage looks very bad and inconsistent. From one specific angle it looks decent, but as soon as I move the camera even a little, the lighting falls apart. The sides that don’t receive direct light become extremely dark (almost black), which makes the grass look harsh and unnatural.

I need this to work properly because the game has a continuous day-night cycle, so the grass has to stay believable under changing lighting conditions.

When I look at the grass texture (PNG) itself, the roots/base of the grass are not that dark. But when I apply either my own material or the default foliage material that comes with the engine, the shadowed parts (especially the roots) become way too dark. The result never looks soft or natural it just looks muddy and unpleasant.

I’ve never been able to get foliage looking good in Unreal, so I’m clearly doing something wrong, but I can’t figure out what.

I will attach the relevant screenshots below (grass texture + in-engine results from different angles).

Any help or guidance on how to properly set up grass/foliage materials for consistent, soft lighting (especially with day-night cycle) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[HorizonNK]

btw i want to make this

[ChenDong]

Almost-black backsides on grass are usually a shading model issue rather than the texture. In your grass material, set Shading Model to Two Sided Foliage (or Subsurface) and plug a dark-ish green into Subsurface Color, so light passes through the blades instead of the unlit side receiving only sky light. Next, fix the normals: grass cards with the default mesh normals point in every direction, so either use a mesh with normals pointing up (or exported as “sphere/up” normals from your DCC), or in the material blend the normal toward (0,0,1) world-space with Transform Vector so the whole clump shades like the ground. Also enable “Two Sided” in the material and make sure the foliage type has “Cast Contact Shadow” and “Affect Distance Field Lighting” set sensibly, since dense grass self-shadowing with Lumen can make the roots very dark. For a day-night cycle, check that your Sky Light is set to Real Time Capture so the ambient fill updates, and you can lift the roots slightly by multiplying Base Color/AO with a gradient from the vertex color or UV V coordinate instead of letting them go fully dark.