On the subject of grass not accepting point lights, I have done some experiments that did result in point lights working on grass. There is a catch though, I had to convert grass to a tree, lol. See screenshots after which I will explain what I did and what my suspicions are regarding why standard grass does not work:
The reason the grass above is giant is due to the thicket01 model.
What I did was copy the thicket01.nif model (which is actually a tree) and identified its textures as those found in fieldgrassobj01.nif. I also created a normal for fieldgrassobj01 using GIMP (although I am not entirely sure this actually made any difference, it certainly did not help within the original grass nif, more testing required).
I then opened up CK and duplicated the Thicket object in the Tree branch, edited its model to point to my new "thicket-grass" and then manually placed the model for testing.
Upon success, I tried to place the original Grass object and was given an error message indicating the model could not be rendered. Tracing back to how the original grass object is used in the CK, I discovered it is referred to only by a Landscape texture leading me to believe you can only place this grass as part of landscape modeling. I suspect the engine treats all of these types of objects different and regardless of what you do to the nif model, it will not apply point light to them (guessing here).
So good news, it can be done. Bad news, a whole lot of work to go around replacing existing grass with new "tree like" models of grass. Not to mention what it may do to FPS.
