Why did i want to do lighting

So i was happy enough, finished a nice chunk of my buildings roughly till more detail later on, i want to get some lighting in to see how the atmosphere is, WHYYYY

I started in the park, some shadows on from a lampost down onto the grass in a night time scene, would look alright, well no

As i found out foliage layers dont take too kindly to lighting! so when i remove the skylight i got:



Theres no light, it should all be black but no the grass in the foliage layer doesnt do lighting...infact it just ignores it, i tried adding in a dark fog layer but still the grass shined out and totally ruined it.

Next up i hunted around for a mesh that accepted light after playing with materials for god knows how long, ok this one accepts light but now it runs like total crap

My PC is not slow, far from it but i had 14fps with 1 light in the area, something wasnt right, i found some console commands and brought up "stat engine" and found it was trying to render 500,000 foliage instances....rrrrightt.

Changed the mesh size and lowered the denisty by far, and the draw distance got it down to 40,000 but still it was chugging along which left me with no other choice but to ditch the layer entirely and leave myself with just a material which i wasnt happy about as unreal's grass textures are not very good for my type of enviroment i needed something more realistic looking so ive been making my own material with some textures, still trying out different grasses but the first one i made doesnt look too bad:



Its just a default light for now i was seeing how it looked, i dropped the scale down as far as it would go without it looking too obviously tiled and its not too bad but i think i can get a higher res texture, drop the pavement down so the grass looks like it has more depth.



Obviously the floors wrong but that isnt the point of this post, this is with a better light i hope, was seeing how it handles meshes, the game doesnt seem to like doing shadows, it could be a user error though, this doesnt look too bad with the light cone and the slight yellow tint not sure how final it is however. Ive also added a low density heightfog to darken the sky and the water down and overall drop the feeling to a late night/dark skies from the volcanic ash, maybe i can do something with the sky later on to simulate some black clouds im not sure if its even possible and its very far down on my list but its something to keep in mind if i have the time.

Ive also spent the last 4-5hrs sorting out my custom packages, now im starting to incorporate my own materials i wanted to make sure everything would work no matter what machine is was on as i remember issues from year 2 when some of us used this engine for our maps and some custom assets werent showing up. So i basically i rebuilt my custom package actually into the map so i only have 1 file to work with, all my assets now load where my terrain layer and light maps do, it also built 14 seconds quicker!..which may not sound much but when it only took 38 in the first place!