Unreal Engine Sucks? You're doing it wrong

In this video we break down common misconceptions, workflows and go over how nanite can solve our optimization problems WHEN properly utilized.

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Timecodes
00:00 - Overview
02:10 - Case 1
06:39 - Case 2
11:48 - Case 4
19:44 - Outro

[DallasDrap]

This video is more of an explanation/breakdown of the nanite workflow and process. The detailed tutorial will be coming shortly!
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[kebrus]

Hey, technical artist here. Do keep in mind that nanite simplifies geometry based on connected meshes, it's what Epic calls "aggregate meshes". The reason this is important is because if you have continuous surfaces nanite will keep reducing the mesh properly at large distances, but if you have a lot separate submeshes nanite will try to keep the mesh boundary which means it will have a harder time reducing the geometry. This is specially important for foliage, a pine tree will underperform compare to a any tree with big leafs, simply because each need can't be reduced further properly

[Ad-imne]

I am begging you to make more videos like this. These 20 minutes just flew by, very informative and interesting to watch

[YarGolubev]

The trouble is that epics began to tell how to work with nanites only in 2024 (!) 4 years after the release of ue5.
Seriously - the lecture "nanites for artists" came out in the spring of 2024!

Many people don't even know about the existence of these materials!

[desafio_estelar]

you should do a video talking about Lumen and how to use it properly

[thana]

Id say the main performance impact simply comes from the fact that nanite and VSMs require you to use SM6 which itself runs slower than SM5. So like you said, nanite itself isn't necessarily the culprit. Its a mix of how people utilize it as well as the fact that SM6 must be used.

[importon]

I really wanted to see the overdraw view on case 3

[ForexReason]

FINALLY! Some information I can get behind... as only a 1 year "dev" I currently have a combination of LOD's and some Nanite... Maybe that's "wrong" to use both? But I did tests on pretty much everything I added to scenes and I found some things worked better with Nanite on, and some better with it off. Now I know why! THANK YOU! I also went down the road [you mentioned] of removing as many triangles from foliage etc etc... As a solo dev I have used a fair amount of assets, but done a lot of work on customizing textures and where possible mesh's. Now I'm going to have to seriously consider modelling my own trees in the Nanite way to take advantage of that.... Anyway... more importantly... videos like this are SOOOO valuable and I appreciate it a ton! As a self taught guy, you don't know what you don't know... a lot of what I know is through extensive testing. So keep these coming please. I would love to know somebody who has the inside track, and videos like this are the next best thing. Information like this is hard to find, even on Epics forum where there seem to be a lot of people with opinions not based on reality.

[FirstCrimson]

This is a fantastic start to what I believe could be a great series of videos and tutorials that brings the discussion (or argument) in a positive direction aimed at educating developers rather than... whatever the latter is.

Keep up the great work!

[jacobburtonmcfaul]

can you compare the fps of the masked foliage with nanite turned off to the nanite foliage with nanite on, seems like it'd be a lot more fair of a comparison

[illyabut]

Dallas, thank you for showing this workflow! I was a bit confused with some use cases of nanite, especially foliage and this video helps a lot

[Fafhrd]

One big caveat of the fully modeled Nanite foliage is memory. Even with Nanite compression, fully modeled foliage can and will take up a lot more memory because you're looking at multiple orders of magnitude more vertices and triangles.

[tom.looman]

Excellent! Looking forward to more videos!

We can't blame folks for using Nanite "wrong", there wasn't any solid public information on it for years and everyone has just been figuring it out on their own. We also see Nanite improving pretty drastically from 5.0, so we're developing against a moving target (more than other 'stabilized' features).
Edit: That said, Nanite still lacks full integration for some systems and tricks we've used for many years and I keep finding more.

[RazielAU]

Just to add to this, Nanite is designed to render approximately 1 triangle per pixel. That means if you're rendering at 1080p, you're targeting 2 million triangles, and for 4K, you're increasing your triangle count to 8 million. Now, the issue with overdraw, and why @DallasDrap mentioned that Nanite doesn't like it, is because if you're overdrawing, you're effectively rendering more triangles than you need to (i.e. more triangles than your pixel count, and triangles getting rendered over other triangles, which you won't see anyway). It's just something to need to look at if you're using Nanite.

[simonandersson]

After being slightly demotivated last few weeks from reading and hearing about all the bad parts and future of unreal engine, this really made my day!

I was even having thoughts of returning to unity. Im looking forward to more content and videos from you, well deserved sub!🎉

[joshuaruggles]

Currently in the process of creating my own full geometry foliage. There are not many tutorials covering this full workflow so looking forward to watching yours. Thank you for what you do and keep up your great work!

[EveBatStudios]

I feel like we are also largely living in a time where people are conditioned to approach things from a negative and critical angle. At minimum I would say that youtube ends up pushing more of those negative titles into the algorithm which seems to have people inventing things to be upset about for content. It could just be because people are more likely to engage with negativity but I would really like to see some course correction on this one because its exhausting.

[musashidanmcgrath]

Did you watch the recent Epic GDC talk that specifically covers Nanite foliage and over draw and ongoing development in optimisations and solutions to known issues?

[ArcanumRonin]

Great video. I was suspicious at first, but after watching the whole thing, great job.

[Boxoffire]

Thank you for the well thought out, well made video. Idt some people realize how destructive just slinging mud can be.