Hello, this is my first post here, still learning how the forum works and if this is the right place to post my questions.
So, my question is simple and has 2 parts:
Does Nanites handle textures the same way as the traditional LOD? does it decrease its resolution over distances? (I could not find any official data on this)
PlayStation 4 and Xbox One Nanite support is currently considered experimental.
Which all of the above are crucial for a game’s development and shipping of the game product.
And, the question here is: How safe is to use Nanites at this point for game development?
You didn’t read the documentation well then, it explicitly states:
“Nanite should generally be enabled wherever possible. Any Static Mesh that has it enabled will typically render faster, and take up less memory and disk space.”
Nanite should be enabled on 90% of meshes in the scene, otherwise in probably isn’t a good option.
On the other limitations
Custom UVs
I believe this is referring to the Customized UVs node in the material editor and isn’t crucial
Blend Modes using Masked or Translucent
Nanite supports Masked Materials now, translucent elements should be separate mesh that doesn’t have nanite enabled, not a big deal.
Deferred Decals
Kinda sucks, but you can have 3d modeled out “decals” that are really meshes you’re using in place of decals.
Two Sided
Two sided was already problematic, especially with lumen and mesh distance fields. Close your meshes or duplicate and invert them.
Forward Rendering
Mostly used for VR or mobile games.
Multisampling Anti-Aliasing
Other features already rely on temporal AA or temporal upscaling
I’ve been reading a lot Unreal documentations lately since I’m new to this engine (but no to game development and game engines in general), and this last one I read it late last night and probably need to read it again.
But, the question of how Nanites handles textures still remains.
So, ‘Custom UVs’ is referring to the UVs modified inside Unreal Engine, right?
This is one that troubles me the most, since I’ll be adding a vast amount of custom made assets.
While using traditional LOD on a mesh you have multiple instances of the same mesh but with lower vertex count/mesh quality.
Each level of LOD has its own texture that reduces in size/resolution according with the level of LOD.
Now, Nanites is Unreal 5 new way of generating LOD for a mesh, and it has a plethora of documentation about how Nanites works on a mesh. But, it does not referred anywhere on how Nanites generate LOD for the texture the mesh is carring.
Does it reduce the resolution of the texture as the distance grows from the player’s position?
Important thing there: The documentation version you have is for Unreal Engine 5.0, we are currently on version 5.3; massive changes and upgrades to the nanite system have been made such that it can handle many cases it struggled with before. By and large, the only common use cases that nanite poses a problem for is skeletal geometry and translucency, most other limitations can just be fixed with different pipelines.
No. It is referring to a method of vertex interpolation that was used for shader optimization prior to the “vertex interpolator” node being added which does the same thing.
Thank you, this clarifies things about UVs.
Do you happen to know anything about my original question? About if and how Nanites generate texture LOD on the mesh they are applied?