An Artist’s Guide to Using Nanite Tessellation | Unreal Fest 2024

In this talk, we explore the new Nanite features for UE 5.4 and look at best practices to keep in mind when building with Nanite. This artist-focused session will cover everything you need to know to create Nanite meshes that run well and don't blow your memory budget.

[PeterTurnerD]

Thanks! Great talk. Very thought provoking and well presented. There's enough info in this presentation to justify a week long seminar! 😁

[retrowrath]

I've been building a Curse 2 Unreal Tournament map myself with Nanite, with tessellation and remembered about how it doesn't like to be overlapped too much, so I made all the walls and floors a one sided flat plane and joined up the geometry to make it all seamless, seem to work better than boxes everywhere. Lots of learning to do.

[Dannington]

Nice! Really great to see Arran's presentations - long time fan having seen a lot of his pre-Epic-employee stuff at the London Is Unreal Meetup group over the years. Nice Arran - i'm pleased your inimicable presentation style is unchanged.

[kevinmarkwell]

I think I get some of this, but for us noob indie devs who haven't yet got an artist, I'd love a breakdown tutorial on how Nanite can use replication for multiple simple identical geometries. For example, I built a whole castle out of thousands of identical stone blocks with the same texture (easyish in SketchUp), and would love to know how to use Nanite and, I assume, use layering to keep models like it efficient, and ideally, with texture variants.

[alexanderalza]

Lovely stuff, thanks for sharing your knowledge!

[DatGuyGLK]

What is meant by 'adding blocking volumes to foliage' 33:25

[secondfavorite]

Dang, if only this was released when I was building those stone walls ... 😂 I would have loved to do them the right way! I did bake that flat wall into a tiling texture, but I wasn't able to get the displacement working with the base material. I should have asked for more assistance!

At any rate, thank you for fixing them and educating!

[perfectionist]

Great presentation.
Over my head lol

[RedSkyBoxstudios]

I have bin following this procces for a while i like this guy

[knl]

for edge tear problem, i have found that setting the center to 1 can fix the issues in some cases, I had a tower on which I used nanite brick material and I tried everything but nothing worked so I accidentally set the center to 1 from 0.5 and it worked.

[nathancreates]

I can't remember what video I saw it on, but I thought with this feature you were offering an option that would generate the displacement at cook time and use a static Nanite mesh at runtime, which would keep the same performance characteristics of ordinary Nanite for the many cases where the displacements don't need to update in real-time. I would understand if this might be disk inefficient for larger tiling surfaces, but it would be handy as an option to use displacement for workflow, but keep the better optimisation of static Nanite meshes.

[kazioo]

1. Does this mean that if you kit bash a lot of rocks together into a rock wall it's better to remesh it all into a single solid geometry? 2. If I have a lot of this kind of objects in the scene and large surfaces with small repeating or even tiling elements - Is the right approach to compromise and pack it into mid size chunks? I remember when Nanite was announced the common fear was the disk space. But apparently the obvious workaround by cloning the repeating geometry is also not a good idea. Ironic, how the new tech that was supposed to free us from the polycount optimization struggle introduced new challenges. Same reason voxel engines couldn't take off for 30 years.

[TheDudesRug]

Was the "costly" type of nanite displacement that shouldn't be used often because of the performance cost about having nanite bake the displacement map?
And the more efficient nanite displacement was from pre-baked displacement texture?
If not I'm confused about the explanation.

[coltonwiley]

Can't get it to function properly on landscapes. It's super noisy and doesn't even represent the heightmap at all. Tons of artifacting idk why yours works works.

[roberthennings]

Great info. Much needed as I am sitting with this now. A few questions. I often get disappearing leaves on trees and can mitigate it somewhat with Preserve Area, but maybe there is correct way to do Nanite trees. I'm also using a 32 bit exr with midpoint set to 0 for displacements with great results. No need to do height adjustments, but maybe there is a drawback?

[sonic]

How do I create internal blocking geometry for nanite? 33:50.

[DLVRYDRYVR]

Micro polygon virtualized geometry, Micro polygon virtualized geometry, Micro polygon virtualized geometry

[tbarsnessvfx]

also I want to point out that the normals from nanite tessellation displacement don't look correct. You can see shadowing but the lighting does not respond correctly . Its very flat.

[FreedomDavied]

Does anyone have any Project or PDF of this video?

[melic-chazaryan]

I don’t understand; it seems like all of this could be explained very simply, but why does he explain it in a way that is not clear?