I know many of us are stoked about the way Nanite deals with massive amounts of detail. What I’m most excited for is when Nanite/Lumen will support WPO so we can have proper foliage blowing in the wind, and moving when objects or characters interact with it. I think one of the most jarring things in any game is pop-in for foliage. This has been mitigated over the years by using dithering to fade in different LODs. With the advent of Nanite, the “pop-in” effect is gone!
I ran some tests for kicks, and was able to spawn in around 4 billion grass instances on screen and still maintain well over 60fps, and even over 100fps with TAA’s Super Resolution.
I’m also interested in this. The lack of deformation support (like WPO) for Nanite is the main limiting factor here.
In your test, are these all individually modeled grass blades with opaque material…?
We are using nanite trees and grass in our project. The amount of details it can render is impressive but in order to not have your foliage details disappear you need to increase nanite resolution to a point where it will cause serious performance issues. If you go even higher or place to many highpoly meshes nanite will start flickering out of existence. That’s also directly linked to your resolution. I am not sure if we will ever be able to use it for foliage that’s not close to the camera.
It would be awesome if you could explain how you created the nanite trees and grass. We tried making them but then they lost all material attributes. I created a custom texture to apply to the grass with no masking, and it worked in the viewer, but not at runtime.
Nothing stopping you from making non-masked foliage (i.e. just model a grass patch as a solid object, no need to mask grass blades as planes if you’re using nanite).
It still won’t work with displacement though so IMO there’s no reason to use Nanite for foliage at this time…unless y’all just love grass that doesn’t move when the wind blows
