Thanks so much for taking the time to answer questions. UE5 is incredible; Lumen and Nanite are amazing, and I’ve been really enjoying using the engine.
One of the only major disappointments for me is the lack of support for tessellation (especially on landscapes, but also on other meshes since it was more flexible and - unlike nanite - doesn’t require building everything in external software). I know tessellation was not an ideal solution and came with a lot of its own problems - but it was flexible and solved a lot of use-cases for displacement in a non-destructive way. VHFM as an alternative has too many issues of its own (more difficult to implement, RVT limitations, very buggy). I’ve heard rumors of nanite supporting WPO in the future, but even that could still mean we have to think about pre-tessellating models in an external program (yuck), and this might not apply to landscapes anyways.
At the moment Nanite is amazing, but aside from the limitations described for foliage in the questions above and the limits for landscapes, it also very importantly isn’t non-destructive. So if you need to make changes to a mesh, maybe move a texture that works with a displaced surface for example, you’re now forced to send that model back to 3D modelling (since that texture’s displacement has to be baked-in in advance). This is a huge workflow problem.
So my question is, with so many use-cases that Nanite just can’t do lost from the engine with the removal of tessellation, will we ever see those gaps brought back to the engine (either with Nanite or otherwise) and will it ever be able to work non-destructively (i.e. texture-driven on meshes without the need for pre-tessellating or pre-displacing externally)?