I’m hoping you can provide some color around the future of Nanite and foliage support. I think initial assumptions were that Nanite would struggle with foliage, due to the way Nanite reduces triangles and the inherent size of leaf geometry. That being said, we’ve now seen WPO and Two-Sided material support added to Nanite on the UE5-main branch in GitHub, leading to speculation that Nanite is becoming more of a possibility for foliage. After testing the newest branch, Nanite has proven mindblowing for up-close foliage, but we still see the challenge of leaf geometry loss at longer distances.
I absolutely appreciate the wizardry that you’re pulling off with Nanite, but it would be nice to have a clearer sense of what you all feel is possible with Nanite and foliage in the near-ish term. As you can see from the popularity and engagement on Nanite/Foliage-related discussions and videos, this is a big deal, but at the end of the day we’re a bunch of devs excitedly speculating about a feature that we know requires a lot of very difficult work on your part.
If the elimination of leaf geometry is a challenge that you feel you are still a long way off from solving, limiting Nanite and foliage usage to scenes with higher screen space values, can you provide a few details about what you could see as alternatives or hybrid approaches? Maybe giving devs the ability to add our own octahedral imposter to the end of the Nanite LOD train? Easier ability to swap between Nanite/Imposter meshes in a blueprint based on screen space?
It’s so brutal knowing we would be leaving so much on the table skipping Nanite for trees with what it is capable of now that we’re desperate to find a solution that accommodates longer draw distances/smaller screen spaces.