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

[@Dannington]

Nice! Really great to see Arran's presentations - long time fan having seen a lot of his pre-Epic-employee stuff at the London Is Unreal Meetup group over the years. Nice Arran - i'm pleased your inimicable presentation style is unchanged.

[@PeterTurner3D]

Thanks! Great talk. Very thought provoking and well presented. There's enough info in this presentation to justify a week long seminar! 😁

[@retrowrath9374]

I've been building a Curse 2 Unreal Tournament map myself with Nanite, with tessellation and remembered about how it doesn't like to be overlapped too much, so I made all the walls and floors a one sided flat plane and joined up the geometry to make it all seamless, seem to work better than boxes everywhere. Lots of learning to do.

[@secondfavorite]

Dang, if only this was released when I was building those stone walls ... 😂 I would have loved to do them the right way! I did bake that flat wall into a tiling texture, but I wasn't able to get the displacement working with the base material. I should have asked for more assistance! At any rate, thank you for fixing them and educating!

[@aren-joebizdikian5236]

Hello, how did you initially create that wall?

[@alexanderalza7964]

Lovely stuff, thanks for sharing your knowledge!

[@RedSkyBoxstudios]

I have bin following this procces for a while i like this guy

[@kevinmarkwell]

I think I get some of this, but for us noob indie devs who haven't yet got an artist, I'd love a breakdown tutorial on how Nanite can use replication for multiple simple identical geometries. For example, I built a whole castle out of thousands of identical stone blocks with the same texture (easyish in SketchUp), and would love to know how to use Nanite and, I assume, use layering to keep models like it efficient, and ideally, with texture variants.

[@apricreed9580]

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.

[@nathancreates]

I can't remember what video I saw it on, but I thought with this feature you were offering an option that would generate the displacement at cook time and use a static Nanite mesh at runtime, which would keep the same performance characteristics of ordinary Nanite for the many cases where the displacements don't need to update in real-time. I would understand if this might be disk inefficient for larger tiling surfaces, but it would be handy as an option to use displacement for workflow, but keep the better optimisation of static Nanite meshes.

[@perfectionist724]

Great presentation. Over my head lol

[@DatGuyGLK]

What is meant by 'adding blocking volumes to foliage' 33:25

[@seithcg]

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...

[@danieldanszky1252]

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

[@ConsuetudoGames]

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.

[@fdaddy509]

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.

[@Cloroqx]

@@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.

[@RH-adventure]

Great info. Much needed as I am sitting with this now. A few questions. I often get disappearing leaves on trees and can mitigate it somewhat with Preserve Area, but maybe there is correct way to do Nanite trees. I'm also using a 32 bit exr with midpoint set to 0 for displacements with great results. No need to do height adjustments, but maybe there is a drawback?

[@knl654]

for edge tear problem, i have found that setting the center to 1 can fix the issues in some cases, I had a tower on which I used nanite brick material and I tried everything but nothing worked so I accidentally set the center to 1 from 0.5 and it worked.

[@DLVRYDRYVR]

Micro polygon virtualized geometry, Micro polygon virtualized geometry, Micro polygon virtualized geometry

[@DanielWhitmer]

Showtime!

[@TheDudesRug]

Was the "costly" type of nanite displacement that shouldn't be used often because of the performance cost about having nanite bake the displacement map? And the more efficient nanite displacement was from pre-baked displacement texture? If not I'm confused about the explanation.

[@kazioo2]

1. Does this mean that if you kit bash a lot of rocks together into a rock wall it's better to remesh it all into a single solid geometry? 2. If I have a lot of this kind of objects in the scene and large surfaces with small repeating or even tiling elements - Is the right approach to compromise and pack it into mid size chunks? I remember when Nanite was announced the common fear was the disk space. But apparently the obvious workaround by cloning the repeating geometry is also not a good idea. Ironic, how the new tech that was supposed to free us from the polycount optimization struggle introduced new challenges. Same reason voxel engines couldn't take off for 30 years.

[@joefelixcg]

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.

[@honzicekjelinek]

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.

[@aren-joebizdikian5236]

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

[@honzicekjelinek]

@@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.

[@nothankyoutube]

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.

[@randomancy]

Did he say "Tiny Texture" and said we already know how to do that? haha Because I have never heard of that or done it before. Also I thought Nanite and RVT didn't play well together, has this changed? There was a layer shadow artifact for Lumen shadows on a Nanite RVT landscape.

[@sonic55193]

How do I create internal blocking geometry for nanite? 33:50.

[@coltonwiley359]

Can't get it to function properly on landscapes. It's super noisy and doesn't even represent the heightmap at all. Tons of artifacting idk why yours works works.

[@FreedomDavied]

Does anyone have any Project or PDF of this video?

[@IbtesamSadiq]

shadows on dynamic displacement looks bad. I assume It's even with the normal map applied.

[@tbarsnessvfx]

also I want to point out that the normals from nanite tessellation displacement don't look correct. You can see shadowing but the lighting does not respond correctly . Its very flat.

[@jenniferhodoul7523]

Wow

[@melic-chazaryan2769]

I don’t understand; it seems like all of this could be explained very simply, but why does he explain it in a way that is not clear?

[@melic-chazaryan2769]

His explanation was unclear, leaving me confused.

[@miskliy1]

This very angry guy says Nanite is some kind of curse from the Unreal cabal to kill performance or something. I don't have the technical knowledge, but I need someone to explain further. I see a lot of situational problems that can be solved by knowing how to work around and adapt to Nanite's requirements, which I see Epic Games discussing every three months or so.kzbin.info/www/bejne/g2GTdXqgdrVgo7c

[@fredmuromov8236]

Unreal haemorrhoids ! 🤣🤣🤣