Lighting for Landscape Grass Tool

You can crank up skylight intensity for shadow not to be so dark.

As for static shadows from grass, well, you definitely don’t want these. Grass always has some motion, so it is generally better to either have no shadows at all or dynamic shadow. If you still want these, you might consider placing grass with foliage painter.

Hey Guys,

So I have a basic question that I hope some one can answer.

As I understand it there are 3 ways to approach landscape grass/vegetation.

  1. Foliage painter tool.
  2. Landscape Grass Tool (Through the grass node in the landscape material)
  3. Landscape Spawner (through the spawning volume)

I have been using the 1st and 2nd extensively (as I have not needed the extra parameters the spawner offers).
My question is for using static lighting with these options. As I am developing for VR, it is imperative that I keep the performance cost to a minimum. Now there are a few caveats with using static lighting and foliage painter or grass tool. Mainly that static lighting is not supported in the HLOD instancing. This lead me to use the check box “use landscape lightmap” for the grass. Now for the most part I get desired results, except one issue. The grass from the landscape grass tool, does not cast static shadows on the landscape. When I use the painted foliage tool, I do get static shadows from the grass, but the grass itself is full of lighting artifacts.

Another Issue I am having is that the shadows are too dark, despite having a stationary Sky Light. Any one know a fix for this?

It seems to me there is some setting that disables the grass for the landscape grass tool to stop casting static shadows. I also found that when viewing from the TOP viewpoint, my grass elements cannot be seen or are not drawn. My guess is that they are not treated as primitives. I understand that the grass meshes themselves are instanced and might not support lightmaps, and hence have artifacts, but they should at least cast static shadows on the landscape mesh.

I have attached 2 images, one with stationary Directional and Sky Light and the other with Movable Directional Light. I am looking for shadows being cast from the grass meshes on to the landscape, like the 2nd Image, but through Static Lighting.

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I am no programmer coder or game dev expert. I have limited knowledge, but am trying to put the pieces together. So if my assumptions are wrong (I am sure some if not most are), please do correct me so I can learn and so can others reading this!