Intro to Unreal Engine 5 Nanite: Better than Houdini, Blender, zBrush?

[@PavelKabush]

Nanite works only with static meshes, so wouldnt it be fare to tick the pack toggle in houdini?

[@bubblepins]

nono Nanite works with every type of mesh I believe, even landscapes as part of the UE 5.3 release. The point I was trying to make was that Nanite makes it so easy that we don't need to retopologize our meshes anymore, which spoils us as 3D artists. But there are still meshes worth retopologizing, like characters, because topology affects how the character mesh deforms and Nanite can't save you there. I should have made that more clear.

[@talalqazi9545]

@@bubblepins wht my guy wnts to say is tht as nanite doesnt work with deforming meshes it would be fair to pack and instance in houdini to where it will be much faster than ue and I believe ue is instancing under the hood anyways the way nanite works is it reduces polygon count as we get far then may be switch adaptive subdiv in karma then it would be a fair comparision when it comes to landscape , the reason karma wont do it in real time bcz it doesnt hv to it need to render frames as efficiently as possible so it will adaptively subdivide mesh before rendering a frame according to the distance from the camera.

[@bubblepins]

@@talalqazi9545 I agree karma is pretty awesome in Houdini! And animation isn't all that great in UE or at least I'm not use to doing animation in UE yet. And I do prefer other software apps for animation, so I get what you're saying too. But I do enjoy the lookdev experience in UE and how kitbashing/setting up environment scenes is so smooth in the viewport. It's not fun when you want to transform a model, like move it to the right/left a little and it lags in the viewport and I want responsive plus enjoy nice looking graphics for lookdev. I guess in that sense I would prefer UE.

[@eftorq]

Nanite works with alembic procedurals, so it works with deforming and moving geometry

[@bubblepins]

@@eftorq Thanks, that's good to know!

[@BenAbrigil]

can unreal 5 sculpt?

[@bubblepins]

I don't believe so.

[@slaughterhouseproduction]

wait a second if rtx 4090 is not a titan then which graphic card is? Im new to these gpu numbers, I run unreal on a rtx 3060 with no major problems 🤔

[@bubblepins]

I have an rtx 4090, but not the titan, which is I believe $500 more than the plain 4090, I could be wrong, I don't remember. I use to have a dual 2080 that I had to take out, because the 4090 is a power hog. To me it is a huge difference, because I jumped 2 models.

[@collectiveunconscious3d]

I wonder if they can make something like nanite for path tracing but I guess not, otherwise it would have been here already. I've spend a lot of time with ray tracing and you gotta know the tricks, lots of limitation, to making it look real, I feel it only works well for environmental stuff as soon as you go into complex cinematic stuff, fog, vdb's, movements and specifically reflections, things get hard. You can pull it off but it just takes me 3 times as long and path tracing in other software takes longer as well but just less of a hassle and more control

[@bubblepins]

I think they are trying, but I don't know how difficult it would be. The nanite sample projects they showed off looked so good, if I could get my scenes to look like that I would be ok with or without path tracing.

[@King-mj2bn]

It's just completely different tech with completely different demands. Nanite can do a good chunk of its work when you import assets. Path tracing, by its very nature, needs to happen in real time (otherwise you're just talking about standard lightmapping.)

[@King-mj2bn]

Just wanted to point out a bit of a flaw in your benchmark. Nanite excels with identical meshes since it would be redundant for the GPU to process that data more than once. I.e. as far as Nanite's overhead on the GPU is concerned, adding one 12-million poly mesh is no different than adding ten of them. The more unique meshes you add to a scene, the greater the reduction in the cost-benefit ratio.

[@bubblepins]

I didn't think about that! But the clusters are changing dynamically different for each model, because I turn the camera. But you have a good point.

[@King-mj2bn]

@@bubblepins So basically Nanite is an aggressive form of triangle optimization. A tree cluster is built for the mesh on import, then at runtime it fetches any needed "branches" of the tree. So while yes your clusters are def changing, your GPU has already precomputed these clusters so at this point it's more or less just fetching data. Btw I'm completely in love with your channel! Finally decided to dive into Houdini and you've made the journey so incredibly painless.

[@bubblepins]

@@King-mj2bn Yeah I realized that after you pointed it out, the overhead in the gpu is optimized for the same model. Dang.... I should have used different models for this video. Thanks for watching my Houdini videos! I've been meaning to get into more shading in Houdini's Karma, hopefully soon. What types of topics in Houdini are you interested in? I'll add it to my never ending list.

[@King-mj2bn]

@@bubblepins Hmm..that's a really great question actually, especially since I still have a lot of your content to feast on before I feel as comfortable as I do in Maya or ZBrush. Perhaps the workflow for UV mapping in Houdini? But in general I actually like longer vids that delve into the entire process of creating assets from start to finish, since it offers great insight into the practical application of all these different concepts.

[@bubblepins]

@@King-mj2bn It's hard... I use to do long videos like 45min to 1hr videos and a lot of people didn't like how it was so long, so I split it up into Basic Concept videos and then the views dropped like crazy for concept 3 and beyond. It's hard. And it's hard editing the visuals for beginner videos. I'm going to try doing some live stream soon, so hopefully I can yap longer, because I love explaining stuff and it would be great to get a live feedback from the audience. UV's in Houdini, I struggled with that for a long time, then I got use to it and started making procedural UV generators for my assets, so I can input my 2 cents on this! Thanks for the idea!

[@Tertion]

Nanite and Lumen are awesome additions to UE... but I really don't see the point of comparing a real-time game engine with softwares that are mostly used for ray-traced rendering. They don't have the same purpose. Even Unreal's path tracing renderer looks like crap compared to Cycles.

[@bubblepins]

You are right and that was something I thought about too, but I feel it was nice to compare the viewport and lookdev experience. Sometimes when setting up the lights and assets in the scene, the smooth viewport makes the lookdev experience a lot better and less frustrating.

[@Tertion]

​@@bubblepinsI agree

[@TRUEbASNER]

Yeah that 4090 is eating up those polys like its nothing

[@bubblepins]

I know! It's awesome! If you ever wanted to do 3D animation or a lot of rendering work, 4090 is something everyone should consider as an investment. But it is quite pricy and remember the nvidia 4090 gtx is rated at 500W, so use a PC wattage calculator online to double check if you need to upgrade your UPS as well, adding more to the expense, I know :(