UE5.4 Step-by-Step Landscape Material | 17: NANITE DISPLACEMENT

In this Unreal Engine 5 course, suitable for complete beginners, I'll be covering the creation of automatic landscape materials to bring life and realism to your worlds, whether they be for games development or movie making.

In this episode, we'll add Nanite Displacement to our landscape and talk about the pros and cons of this technique. Even without displacement. the height map can be useful for fixing seams in our tiling variation.

r.Nanite.AllowTessellation=1
r.Nanite.Tessellation=1

The Asset ID for the Desert Rock texture is xisbchvs

00:00 - Intro
00:40 - Set up Project Config
01:41 - Ensure Displacement is Enabled
02:06 - Add Desert Rock Texture
04:56 - Convert Landscape to Nanite
06:13 - Configure Master Material for Displacement
07:49 - Add Displacement Calculation
17:17 - Test Displacement
18:29 - Fix Displacement Offset
20:29 - Second Test
20:58 - Pros and Cons of Nanite Displacement
24:35 - Add Height Influence to Tiling Variation
29:26 - Benefit of Height Map without Displacement
30:11 - Switch off tessellation for performance
31:26 - Coming Up Next

[EmreAy-vc]

Personal note: Minute 30:12. Important part for disabling tessellation correctly.

For those still working with 8K landscapes in Unreal Engine 5 and encountering full memory usage after enabling Nanite, here's what worked for me: I'm working with a landscape that's divided into "LandscapeStreamingProxy" sections. Think of it like taking a sheet of paper (our landscape) and cutting it into many small squares (let's say 30). If your landscape is structured similarly, you can enable Nanite for smaller sections at a time. For example, enable Nanite for squares 1-10, build the data, save, close, and reopen the project. Repeat for squares 11-20, and so on. This allowed me to apply Nanite to my entire 8K landscape without maxing out my 80GB RAM. I've seen reports of people hitting 190GB RAM usage, so this might help others too.

[DamienRamirez]

Never actually considered using subtract for displacement, that's really smart I only did that for the A few tips so if you don't change Center (or magnitude) Using the Scurve material function works perfect even helps round the edges, can saturate it but don't usually need to. Also if you are using Multiply/power e.t.c. & have height issues Add 0.5 fixes all the height issues (keeping in mind not changing center/magnitude) I guess if you subtract 0.5 to start with it might help fix that but not checked. But some texture maps when using variation techniques leave popped up edges on the map tiles in some versions of UE.
You material might also work with 2D texture array I couldn't because Vec4 (RGBA masking on cell & hex tiling). But yours is still Vec2 UV so the Vec 3 (B/3rd you need to change the array) should work. Be an easy way to swap between soil/grass/cliff textures on the fly. basically 5 biodomes in 1. Food for thought towards the end of the series.

[peter]

thank you. im going to make this material from the start this is the best tut ever. thak you so much

[ojdee]

@unrealitybites This is a great series thanks very much for putting it together. I wonder if there is any scope for how to achieve runtime changes such as the material changing as paths are worn, buildings placed etc. ?

[HaoxiaoTian]

Quixel asset of the road material has no longer free, T T

[antirelic]

I'm using 5.5.1. If I turn on Nanite Tessellation, and then turn off RVT, all of my textures disappear. If I turn RVT back on, it works again. If I disable Nanite Tessellation I am able to switch back and forth between RVT and non-RVT just fine.

[MyMorris]

Stupid mistake by myself, but maybe others have the same problem:
If your material stays black after updating MF_CreateLayer, double check that your Input "Add Displacement" is of type "StaticBool" and not just "Bool".

[LeaSeiler_art]

Great video, though the heightmap and mask channel input gave me a missing preview connection for function input texture displacement, and after adding a texture object to it, my entire Landscape layers turned into the default material. Any Ideas?

[johnharrisdev]

Can't get this working in 5.5 at all. Followed every step, to the letter. Landscape shows that nanite is enabled, just no displacement occurs.

[brucehsu]

One problem. There are uv blocks on the ground. It looks out of place.

[LeaSeiler_art]

In 5.5 after enable Tesselation there is another checkbox for displacement fade with start fade size pixel and end fade size pixel. Could this be the same as our camera based fade effects such as the shadowcast and wind threshhold?

[robganondalf]

This was the first time in this tutorial series where I had been completely stuck. I followed along the tutorial completely and my Nanite would just not pop out. Upon a third time watching it I noticed something - RVT was off. I switched mine off and everything worked. I guess Nanite doesn't like RVT?

[marconapolitano]

nanite displacement might be the worst feature i've seen epic put out in a while, Parallax Occlusion Mapping remains a superior alternative in terms of performance with minimal loss in quality