I’m often reading contradictory statements about Nanite, some say that there are no drawbacks to it if used on static geometry, and other say that for some reason high poly with Nanite will lead to poor performance or making bad habits.
I should state that I don’t care about “bad habits” but I understand that not caring about poly count won’t be something popular in industries for a while.
So the question is, can I “abuse” Nanite by not paying too much attention to triangles without any drawbacks in a solo project?
Hey I’m just a hobbyist. I think a misconception is that Nanite meshes allow you to skip optimization, when i feel they just require different optimization.
The premise behind Nanite is that the size of the meshes on disk is recovered by the size of not having a large normal map plus also not needing LODs. You also gain performance and features like better lighting and shadow that is interacting with real geometry vs just faux lighting achieved by normal maps which plays in to all of unreal engine 5’s new systems better.
I’d say it could be bad for a few reasons to just take a raw output from Zbrush and send it in to unreal engine. At the least you’re looking at a huge asset taking up disk space and perhaps there is some performance to this as well (can’t say for sure, someone else will have to chime in.)
For my own workflow when making models, i generally do a high poly sculpt in zbrush using dynamesh then I manually retopo or use auto retopology software to get a low poly. I then bring this back to zbrush, subdivide it while projecting the old detail back to it. I would export it at some subdiv level that captured the detail well enough to look good close up in Unreal Engine. The benefit to this is that it’s much easier to unwrap the UV and you potentially remove millions of polys from the end result.
How much millions of extra tris really matter in terms of nanite performance I can’t say, disk space is a concern as well so your game doesn’t become a TB download. I heard years ago that nanite had to be streamed from disk using SSD, so perhaps this is one limitation, but I’m not informed enough to know if this is the case. My impression from reading Epic’s documentation is that Nanite should perform equal or better to regular meshes even with huge poly counts in context, and that everything even relatively low poly things should still generally be imported as nanite meshes.