Every time a new roadmap is released, I am looking for anything about this, even experimental stuff (like when displacement came for nanite), but nothing so far.
I’m just curious if anyone know anything at all about this, if they are working behind the scenes, if they are far away or getting closer?
Can I ask what your use case is for this?
I don’t think nanite translucency is a priority because translucent materials don’t really get the same benefits from Nanite. They can’t occlusion cull anything behind them and they’re rarely high enough in triangle count to get any benefit from streaming in only visible clusters, deferred shading evaluation, or software rasterization.
The fact that they’re all currently done separately in a forward pass probably also makes it complicated to do it in a performant way.
Use cases would be water/rivers/ocean, high detail objects with glass and similar materials, and maybe not the most important, but the convenience of not having to split every face you suddenly wanted to have a translucent material on into its separate mesh.
I don’t understand too much of the technicalities behind it, I just assumed there would be loads of use cases for it, and the last feature for nanite to be “complete” as we now have nanite landscape and nanite displacement.
Water is probably the easiest because it’s already handled in a separate opaque pass. No clue whether it would be performant though.
For other translucency I suspect it’s still pretty far away. Currently it looks like they’re working on Skeletal Mesh support and proper Hardware Raytracing support for the Nanite geo. After that there are a lot of things that need improvements, performance for foliage is still pretty bad, displacement too. Also plenty of bugs; SDF replacement meshes still don’t work with Nanite, anisotropy doesn’t work on Nanite meshes, fallbacks for Nanite geometry collections is broken, probably lots more issues I’m forgetting…
Anyway… I don’t know the answer to your question, my uninformed speculation is that I don’t think they’ll get to it any time soon as it seems like they still have a lot of things left to do and by now most of the low hanging fruit is gone, so tasks just get increasingly difficult.