What about adding Nanite only for any LOD ?
Let´s say, the player is near a tree, it shows wind on its leaves and masks out the leaves if they are between the camera and the player, like this:
If the player goes farther away, the tree doesn´t need anymore the Masked-Material and World-Position-Offset support and would change to Nanite for more performance ^^
Nanite shouldn´t be limited to the complete mesh, let the devs control, at which LOD, Nanite starts.
Nanite has issues with doing things like leaves right now even if they’re static, so I’m unsure how well that’d work. You could get a similar effect with switching to billboard impostors though.
Nanite is replacing the old LOD thing as it’s a virtual geometry system. You can create a blueprint with two meshes (one nanite mesh and one static mesh) in it, and turn them visible/invisble based on distance to camera.
Yeah, but Actor-Foliages are not that performant, as Static-Mesh-Foliages are ^^
My main goal is, Nanite with Masked-Materials and after watching the Nanite-Livestream, I know, that it will come anytime, the Documentation about this point is a bit unclear…
I don’t really get your point about performance. A static mesh is an actor of the C++ class “Static Mesh Actor”. You can write the code in C++ with your own “Static Mesh Actor” class if you’re afraid about blueprint performance (even if the blueprint code would be really small).
As I said, nanite is virtual geometry so it doesn’t work like static mesh but yes, support of other blend modes are is the roadmap.
I´m not talking about static meshes itself, but about static mesh foliage…
Read by yourself:
Static Meshes placed with Foliage Edit Mode are automatically grouped together into batches that are rendered using hardware instancing where many instances can be rendered with only a single draw call, while Actor Foliage comes at the same rendering cost as placing normal Actors into a scene.
Can be found there: Foliage Tool | Unreal Engine Documentation
And more info about that: Instanced Static Mesh | Unreal Engine Documentation