Hello, i’m developping on 4.27 right now. but out of curiosity i’ve been reading a bit the 5 documentation recently. and even if i know ue5 is in its early stage (didn’t say early access) i have to say that it is really promising on the paper. but before doing the jump i’m investigating a little bit.
in the doc i came across this
does that mean that with nanite now normal map, and lod techniques are now part of the past. this is confusing me a little bit
LODs: Yes, mostly.
Nanite handles LODs itself automatically so they don’t need to be manually generated. That being said, it still uses a proxy mesh if the platform (or engine feature) does not support Nanite, probably the most notable of these is that none of the hardware raytracing features can use the Nanite geometry and so a lower resolution proxy mesh is still needed. By default, the engine will generate one, but it is usually low quality. This is usually fine for Lumen, but if you need raytraced shadows then it is worth making a custom proxy mesh, which at the end of the day, is basically an LOD.
Non-Nanite meshes like foliage and skeletal meshes still require a LOD chain.
Normal Maps: Depends
What you don’t necessarily need is an object level normal map. You can represent everything with geometry if you want however Nanite doesn’t always behave in desirable ways, especially on subtle surface detail, so it can sometimes be better to handle that through a normal map decal for example. You may also opt to texture your mesh with tileable materials which will most likely need a normal map.
So whether or not you need a normal map is often more a personal choice.
Hi. Can i jump in here and ask, so if you want your game to run on as many platforms as possible, you’d better create LODs, and just not bother with nanite, right?
I found this video very informative - they have Fortnite running at 60FPS on the XBox S series with UE5 - to me that shows you can get good performance with Lumen (software) and Nanite on older hardware…
