Nanite | Inside Unreal

We’re kicking off our series of Unreal Engine 5 Early Access in-depth presentations with Nanite, our new virtualized geometry system! Nanite uses a new internal mesh format and rendering technology to render pixel scale detail and high object counts. Join us as we take a look underneath the hood and explore how Nanite was used in the sample project “Valley of the Ancient".

ANNOUNCEMENT POST

**TIMESTAMPS**
00:00 Countdown
04:54 News
06:27 Karma Earners
06:43 Community Spotlights
07:47 Inside Unreal Graphic
08:06 Stream Introductions
09:02 History of Nanite
15:30 Unique Challenges & Workflow
19:27 Artistic & Technical Look
34:05 Approach in Valley Of the Ancients
52:15 The Dream of Nanite
54:50 The Reality of Nanite
56:45 Geometry Representation
57:10 Requirements
58:08 Triangles
58:40 GPU Driven Pipeline
59:51 Triangle Cluster Culling
1:00:42 Decouple Visibility From Material
1:01:48 Deferred Materials
1:03:31 Sub-Linear Scaling
1:05:23 Cluster Hierarchy
1:05:35 LOD Run-Time
1:06:00 Streaming
1:06:39 Pixel Scale Detail
1:07:34 Tiny Triangles
1:08:03 Software Rasterization
1:08:35 Hardware Rasterization
1:09:01 Nanite Performance
1:10:57 Nanite Data
1:13:45 Virtual Shadow Maps
1:15:51 SMRT Filtering
1:16:27 What Nanite Supports
1:19:00 Presentation in Motion
1:33:39 Texturing Assets
1:36:00 UVs
1:40:41 Future Support
1:42:01 Supported Hardware
1:42:45 Landscapes & Nanite
1:46:24 Papers/Talks on Nanite
1:47:20 Collision & Nanite
1:51:00 Foliage & Nanite
1:54:00 Nanite Support
1:58:36 VR & Nanite
2:00:00 Questions and Answers Session
2:33:08 Information and Stream Wrap Up

TRANSCRIPT

[DamielBE]

that short at the beginning was brillant!! it's rare to see horror in space without going all Dead Space or Alien. REally well done!

[NashMuhandes]

I'd like to see a full film made out of that short at the start. That was amazing!

[UnderfundedScientist]

Absolutely legendary, so excited for full release

[CanadianReset]

This was great! Very well explained and easy to understand. I'd love to see a part 2 where Brian goes deeper on how Nanite works.

[grantdillon]

Amazing, amazing. The level of brilliance here in working from first principles to develop a generalized, scalable, graphics engine is just genius. This is a quantum leap for real-time graphics, and likely represents the final prototype for completely photorealistic real time imagery.

[Synkhan]

Honestly thought 36:00 was a high res photo....Then the camera started moving later... I am honestly mind blown by the level of detail achieved. Now all thats left is physics and foliage.

[Cadmeus]

As a hobbyist, raising a glass right now to not fussing around with baking normal maps! It's a dream come true, I'm sure I'm not the only one who found this an annoying technical hurdle when learning the 3d asset pipeline.

[LNYuiko]

What would be amazing to see is procedural generation of landscapes with Nanite. A level design artist could simply enter the parameters: what kind of environment, biome, topography, paths or roads if any, etc. Then the engine using Nanite and the Quixel library will generate a landscape which the artist could then just fine tune and make ready for production. This tech is already being tested in 3d renderers through use of algorithms. Hopefully one day something like it will be in the engine.

[randallcromer]

Unreal 5 is going to change everything because it's the single biggest graphics engine advancement ever. Welcome to the future of graphics and it is looking bright for all content creator's. Thanks to everyone who work on the Unreal 5, you guys are freaking awesome.

[ocokolja]

And it's all for FREE! How crazy is that?

[MrTravoltino]

Euclideon with their "unlimited detail" just quietly crying in the corner...

[massivechafe]

This really reminds me of that idea from Euclideon. (infinite detail real-time engine) though this is so much better lmao

[chucktrier]

I love that you call 128 tri patches edits, i brings mind to the Evans talk. I am blown away and you amazing work is really inspiring. And i am sold that you use your own rasterizer.

[ClowdyHowdy]

I'm not into game design and I don't know a lot about it, but I'm still fascinated by this enough to watch all of it. Like some sort of automated and optimized LOD system that scales like crazy.

[EtailaxiA]

1:31:39 WTF, that's really see how good nanite is

[oholimoli]

Brian should get a Nobel price for his work!

[theishiopian]

"It looks like rocks because there are"

The funny part is that this is so profound from a gamedev perspective

[needsmoretacos]

Thank you so much for this and your siggraph presentation a few years back! These two Videos/ papers along with the UE5 documentation has been a life saver for myself and my company! I am TA responsible for leading the deep-diving, documenting, and creating pipeline best practices for nanite across our entire company and without this and the siggraph presentation I'd be much further back in my deepr understanding of the concepts, logic, and our on the group tests. <3

[jonas_dero]

The technology is amazing thats for sure. It doesnt seem like normal baking will be a thing of the past, simply because a baked map still packs much more detail than a say 2m high poly mesh. Im pretty sure megascans high poly assets are not 'source scans' (which i assume are closer to the 50-100m polys range) Additional microdetail can be extracted from 16k albedo with good results. Also, good luck UVing those assets with millions and millions of polys if you ever want to do any map editing, which is impossible without custom UVs. It seems like we will continue to decimate and bake for the time being but simply being able to use more high poly assets with nanite is really a great improvement! Props to these geniuses!

[TruthIsKey]

Euclideon was first with unlimited details, but you took it to the next level Epic Games, well done!