I may be missing something obvious here, but is there a way to make an object unlit but still cast a shadow?
By default no, an unlit object doesn’t interact with light in any way, so it can’t cast a shadow. From what I understand you can fake shadows per-object using blueprints, I haven’t personally tried it before so I dunno how to execute it, but Ryan Brucks’ blog talks briefly about it.
You can have a duplicate object that is normally lit, set it to hidden in game, and then also set shadow while hidden.
Probably the easiest solution.
Edit: For Skeletal meshes you can call SetMasterPose to make it perfectly mimic another skeletal mesh.
That’s a good idea. I’ll try to see if I can automate that.
It would be great to have that feature.