Is it possible to have more than four active point lights in a scene? I know there’s a limit of 4 lights per standard material, but I don’t want to light the same meshes with many lights, I want each light to affect only a few meshes nearby. Think of a bunch of street lights across a town. Each has a limited radius and should only light a few meshes. And each mesh would be lit by no more than maybe two lights.
My lights’ radii are sensibly small, but still only the first four are active.
This is just an idea (which I haven’t tried) but could you split your project into static and dynamic “zones” so when the user/camera is within a particular zone the lights and shadows are dynamic, but when the user/camera is outside a zone, the shadow maps are frozen? Combined with other environmental effects like fog etc to mask the static zones, it may work pretty well.
There are a number of threads in the forum about this, see for eg:
Yes, you can overide the limit and have more lights. However, this will heavily impact performance.
This looks to me like something to be worked through a lightmap.
Edit: Incidentally, I’m just working some fake spotlights in my scene. As I said, to create the light on the road, you should use a lightmap. However, If you also want to fake the rays of the light from the source, know that you can totally achieve this with no light at all. It goes from the easiest (using a standard material with opacity and eventually a fresnel to the more complex design using NME).
Here’s for my early version (very simple) set-up of my fake spotlights illuminating my sphere.
You can have as many of these as you want since they are all based on a simple mesh and next instanciated.
If you want, I believe I could kickly set-up a pg for you showing the (base of a) result for road illumination, And you could get the base of the materials I used for this first pass sketching, although I’d like to stress out here that this is still an early WIP version - from this morning, incidentally 
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