We opened our project this morning to see half of our assets broken.
Now we notice that Nanite is enabled on everything AND it CANNOT be disabled, nor can we set our own LODs, this is REALLY BAD for every single platform. Switch doesn’t have Nanite, DX11 doesn’t have Nanite, and we cannot set LODs on them, so are they going to always be rendering the LOD0 version?
This is really really bad, especially for big maps.
Nanite is now on by default as it provides better performance in many of the cases we see in Fortnite with little to no downside.
If a platform doesn’t support Nanite it won’t be used. E.g the option is more “use Nanite where supported”
Custom LOD setup and meshes should continue to be used though it
We tried to disable Nanite today and found no way to do so, previously we went inside the Content Drawer and right clicked on the assets > Nanite > Disable. This is no longer available.
And while in most cases it is beneficial, it is really detrimental for our experience, making foliage look completely wrong and making us have to remove our ocean Wave System that we spent so much time on.
If this is not intended, we’d love to know if there’s a fix coming soon.
We also were unable to change any LOD settings after today’s patch, due to Nanite being on.
Can you provide some images of the foliage problems you are talking about?
The crash you are seeing with the ocean asset should be fixed later this week.
Hi Grant!
As you can see there’s no way to disable Nanite on a per-asset way.
Additionally, LOD settings have been changed: notably Screen Size (important) is now disabled.
Here are screenshots of Nanite Enabled plants:
More notably is this where the prop maintains its vertice count at an insanely far distances:
I didn’t even notice this one, we had been waiting for Screen Size for months and it being gone so close to release is not good at all.
I see that this is a change that we should have communicated better and prepared you all for and I apologize for that.
The reason for the change is based on everything we’ve learned in the last year while updating Fortnite to make the most of UE5 features. With Public Beta coming we wanted to be sure people were authoring content in the most optimal way for how Fortnite works today and the direction it’s going. That means having Nanite enabled for better rendering performance on platforms where other high-end UE5 features are available (Lumen and Virtual Shadow Maps). As our internal UEFN projects grew in complexity we began to see a lot of performance issues without Nanite being enabled.
In the static mesh editor you can use “Show Nanite Fallback” to see the traditional LOD meshes and settiings, and you can change the Preview Rendering Level in the main viewport to do the same.
More notably is this where the prop maintains its vertice count at an insanely far distances
This is fine. Nanite renders more efficiently and manages detail itself so its expected that you may see more detail at long distances than with traditional polygon meshes.
Here are screenshots of Nanite Enabled plants:
This does look odd. Would you mind sharing the uasset of this mesh?
Thanks for the reply and extra insight. Ill send over the asset as soon as I can.
Does this mean that if Single Layer Water does not work with nanite, that it is infact a broken feature as nanite cannot be disabled?
Will we be getting a way to disable nanite for scenarios like this whereby we create a custom water shader?
As you can see there’s no way to disable Nanite on a per-asset way.
Yes, this is intended.
Well in that case this is going to block us from making a bunch of things that we previously possible, this should really be considered again as no mesh should be forced to use Nanite, most of our assets now look awful and we had to remove a completely unique custom made ocean due to this change.
We’d be happy to look into any asset you feel looks worse with Nanite enabled. If it’s possible to get the source mesh (gltf/fbx etc) that would be helpful.
we had to remove a completely unique custom made ocean due to this change.
As mentioned several times this is a bug that will be addressed later this week. If you need a resolution faster and its an option, recreating the asset should work.
Sorry let me explain this better, we had a subdivided ocean that we were using to have Fluid Simulation like effects, this is a HUGE part to our experience, we handmade LODs for it that made the Ocean plane go from 94k vertices to 1.5k.
Nanite does not work with it, it barely has 400 vertices, there’s no waves since there’s not enough subdivisions. We haven’t been able to increase the amount of vertices on it, we’re still not sure how that’s done, or they just don’t work, we’ve messes with the settings but nothing seemed to work.
If you could assist us with that I’d appreciate it.
Thank you.
By this, do you mean the Material asset or the mesh itself.
We tried both and we’re still crashing, is the fix for Nanite working with SingleLayerWater or something else?
I apologize for my frustration as well, we were able to adjust the vertices.
