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

For what I have understood in this presentation, nanite is basically a automatic decimation, meaning it works better with single joined mesh compared to having multiple meshes. In what he showed in the video the dev is basically the one who needs to decide what's important for their game, like with your example you have thousands of identical stone blocks that workflow will give you less drive space but less performance on run time but if you joined and merged those meshes inside of blender or zbrush you will get more performance on runtime but more drive space. As for using nanite, I think it works automatically, when you import a 3d asset the check mark to use nanite is already checked in so you don't have to do anything anymore.

Hello, how did you initially create that wall?

Yeah I wish he had showed us at least how those are set up. But as he said their internal team is probably working on presenting a more official way of dealing with that issue...

For the foliage, there is a green bubble under the leaf meshes, that is working as a low poly version of the branch

I really wish he would have explained this is a bit more detail or pointed to a resource we could use. UE5 has been out for over 2 years and it's still not clear how to get nanite foliage working with good framerates (other than not using masked materials). It seems like we just have to wait for them to release something officially.

They're basically using simple circular meshes underneath the leaves that are solid objects that block all the nanite meshes behind it from rendering, making it more efficient. Seems only to be a solution for working with a stylized environment, harder to do with realistic foliage and canopies.

@@ConsuetudoGames They don't have a proper workflow yet, but it's an area of research inside of Epic. Can't do it all at once. Lumen, Nanite, VSM, WP, all of the editor improvements and new tools... It's incredible what they've done in such a short amount of time, and we mostly get to use it for free.

Yeeeeah i got this exactly same opinion lmao. All the proccess of producing Nanite friendly assets is obviously different than the usual way of producing non-nanite assets. And i wish all this would be properly documented but its usually not the case so it turns into a fomo fest of wanting to use whatever they presenting without getting exactly how to use it in the way it is expected from them to be used.

I really didn't get the 2nd question, but it comes to this -> Make modular assets. Modify assets with shaders and displacement to break repetition. If you have one asset as pile of rock or something, remesh it so it has no holes and unnecessary geometry. Don't use assets which tile, you can tile them in engine, to use advantage of instancing, to save rendering perf and disk space. The same thing as with normal non-nanite assets, honestly I don't see a difference, other than, I don't have to make or generate LODs.

@@honzicekjelinek So how would one go about remeshing to remove holes and unnecessary geometry?

@@aren-joebizdikian5236 my first thought is to add some back plane (based on the shape of your asset) to your asset. So if you are making a wall of rocks, you add a plane and remesh. Then you can sculpt the result. Or you can fill the holes by hand.

A watertight mesh will be best, but it's not always realistic, keep your base meshes optimized and you'll be fine with some kit bashing. Just check the nanite overdraw, darker the overlay the better.

Showtime!