Hello,
I have a question to check opinions if this would a good ( temp ) approach.
We are developing an Open World game and started to look to UE5 future possibilities to adapt rather sooner then later ( our game is very pre-alpha anyway ).
World Partition, Lumen and especially Nanite would be such a great help and time saver for us that we started look for a solution to adapt Nanite in it’s current state without Opacity/Translucent options, so we would “cut” our Mesh in 2.
Example ( simple car example ) :
If u have high quality cars ( with 500K to 1mil triangles ) and the Windows are translucent or masked, then it wont get supported ( rendered ) by Nanite,
but it falls back to the LOD system right ?
We have a plugin for UE that could “cut” out pieces of any Mesh, we can choose a material in the Mesh ( in this case the translucent/opacity material ) and it would “cut” out everything that is using that particular Material.
Short said, the car will be “cut” in 2 pieces : one piece with the body/interior/wheel materials and another piece with only the Windows ( translucent ) piece(s) → Nanite would now be able to render the Opaque ( 500K triangles ) piece with only Opaque materials right ?
The other piece will become a standard Opacity Mesh that falls back to LOD, but that doesn’t really matter in our opinion because it’s most likely just some square widows with very low triangle amounts in many cases + it’s quite translucent so u could use an aggressive Cull distance for this Mesh since the eye won’t notice translucent stuff anyway from mid-range.
We could even take this further and “group” certain translucent Meshes that use the same Material to cut Drawcalls even more ( 5 cars with their own Materials but using the same Opacity Material ).
We could stretch this in many ways to tower buildings etc. too if u think about the possibilities.
Later if Nanite would ever support Opacity stuff, we could easily “Merge” the tranclucent Mesh again with the original Opaque body Mesh, it would cost’s us a bit time later maybe but it surely does weight up against the Workflow, time savings now and surely the performance gains.
If u have any opinions or suggestions, please let me know, we are looking for possible workflows to use Nanite in combination with Opacity solutions and this is the only one i can think of for now.
We just need to keep an eye on every scene Material Drawcall wise, we are aware of that but that wont be a problem.
Thanks in advance!