Nanite for Artists | GDC 2024

Much has changed with Nanite since it was first released in Early Access. During that time, artists have been exploring what is possible with technology. In this session, we will demonstrate the best way to build with Nanite, explore the tough edge cases, and create assets that work well across all platforms.

[kazioo]

Epic: "With Nanite you don't need to think about LODs anymore!"
Also Epic: "Nanite is a lot of data, so you should rely on instancing. Also instancing is limited, so here is how you can bring back LODs to swap out Nanite with billboards."

[LoganPinney]

Arran is one of the best tech artists instructors out there! Excellent talk 🎉 thanks for the concise presentation

[egretfx]

the guy who screamed when you turn on the overdraws at 01:44 made my day!❤😂, thank you for this video! we are learning a lot!

[PolygonAcademy]

awesome, very clear and concise breakdown and super smart way of working. thanks for sharing this workflow/technique!

[byunjoy]

I also thought about using pcg to create foliage assets (for billboards tho) when I was messing with tutorial.Fully dynamic workflows is the best tool for these natural environment.Great job!

[dyelon]

Gee, thanks EPIC. I would love to implement this super hacky workflow with the promise that you guys will figure it out properly in the future

[KintaroTakanori]

surprisingly awesome presenter / speaker. well done

[juezna]

So basically the talk was about bringing back LODs into our workflow... nice.
To be fair, it's still pretty amazing how you implemented nanite and the new tessellation feature is really nice too.
If you asked me, it would be nice that you made the process of creating procedural content more artist friendly, the same way you did with CONTROL RIG.
I know people kind of laughed when at the talk they mentioned new gizmos as an exciting feature. It was laughable. BUT, focusing on making things user/artist friendly is something that many software companies many times overlook, and should not be underestimated. If you force users to have to figure out how to use your software instead of enabling them to intuitively explore it and experiment with it, you are loosing users by the second.

I would love to see more commitment with PCG. For example, creating a neat UI with placeholders for the tree components.
Easier material/terrain workflow.
Etc

[oskarwallin]

would love to see a method on baking ground cover color info into landscape textures / rvts. making it possible to remove ground cover completly at distance. (for example if we have an area with bushes clustered around, we cant change the ground texture to match the bush colors, due to up close the ground still needs to be ground texture. sure we can fade it in using textures and masks over the same areas we place this cover, but landscape materials only got 16 sampler slots, and it starts going a bit crazy when using shared sampler slots that needs to tile 1:1 over several landscapes. Sadly enough we're working with landscapes so large and so forested that we're hitting the cluster cap really early.

[sierrafoxtrot]

Insightful! Great work. Hoping we can get this in a content sample so we can review it in editor with some examples. Regardless, thanks for the knowledge!

[PeterKLee]

This is amazing talk.
I'm wondering how I can handle world position offset on the tree leaf in PCG, like wind sway or something.
As far as I know, I can't paint vertex color or change UV on PCG.

[prometheus_beard]

Can't watch it now, but thanks for your time Arran! Looking forward to this.

[Boliang]

I tried this method to make trees but made some adjustments. Instead of using masked material for the leaves, I used actual meshes with opaque material. I noticed that when the camera moves away, the leaves remain mostly the same, eliminating the need to add an extra LOD to the tree.

[carbonium]

ME : you were ment to destroy LODs and billboards not join them !
Nanite : ha ha billboards and LODs go

[pipesfranco]

I want my vertex painting back...EPIC!

[IndyStry]

The talk started with overdraw problem shown with the default approach. Would have been nice to see to see overdraw at the very end to see how much better it got with the method they showed

[huhuhuh]

ever since i have updated to 5.4, I have not been able to use UE. everytime is "GPU Crashed or D3d Device Removed"

[TriChaser]

Really love the presentation. I was wondering whether epic can release the project file from the presentations so that it can be studied by the community?

[tehfn]

I added megascans to PCG Biome and it did not like it at all at anywhere over low scalability. I was 100% sure I was doing something wrong. This video helps me start to understand why I can't just "nanite everything" and go.

[Copa]

Love the presenter and the presentation