- I know that these two new - features were introduced in 5.6, but there are no relevant usage cases online. In order to get familiar with the new features quickly, do you have any relevant cases or documentation?
- What is the future roadmap for these two features? Are there any publicly - available information currently?
Hello,
Assuming you are referring to Nanite instanced skeletal mesh and animation banks, we are still working on examples and documentation to share publicly and those are more likely be available closer to the 5.7 release. A large chunk of the foliage system was only recently merged in CL#44046683.
What is the future roadmap for these two features? Are there any publicly - available information currently?
The next step in the roadmap is to get the Nanite foliage work ready for release in 5.7 so most work on the Nanite Instanced Skeletal mesh and Animation Banks will likely be in support of Nanite foliage.
I’m curious to find out that its original purpose was actually for Nanite foliage.
Then, should this system also support hundreds or even thousands of people in our case?
should this system also support hundreds or even thousands of people in our case?
It depends on the complexity of the skeleton and animation to some degree, but it is used for animating wind in thousands of Nanite trees in the Witcher demo. If the people in your scene can be rendered as Nanite Skeletal meshes it should be possible.
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What’s your suggestion for thousands of skeletal meshes, such as Meta Human? For example, VAT? Or Nanite + Banks?
Hi, VAT is currently the recommended solution for large-scale character animation. You can take a look at City Sample for an example of this on the crowds. We used the AnimToTexture plugin to generate the textures and play them back.
Thank you for your explanation.
I would also like to know if you switch to VAT for the distant LODs of players.
Because Mass supports the function of converting skeletal meshes to static mesh VAT, but the default pawn does not.
For example, if we have 100 real players, should their distant LODs also switch to static meshes and VAT like in the City Sample? Is this the best practice?
There’s a few options to get this working with player characters, but they are all likely to need some form of customization.
The first option is to use a regular actor and component setup for all your characters and manage the transition from static mesh with VAT to skeletal mesh yourself. However, you’d have to write the functionality to manage the switch between the two.
The other option is to go down the route of using Mass like you mentioned. As well as getting the hydration/dehydration functionality as part of this, the other advantage is that you aren’t dealing with full actor/component setups, so you will get performance back with Mass entities vs Actors. But the downside is that, if these are player characters, you’re going to need some form of actor setup to perform replication. So, what you could do here is have some form of actor for each character that gets the replication data and feeds that into Mass to drive the related entity. Again, this would be custom functionality.
Thank you for your answer.
Just to confirm one last thing: do you have any plans to develop similar functions?
This is to avoid us duplicating the same work.
Hi, sorry for the delay on this. I had to speak to the dev team to get more information on their plans. We do want to do some work in this area in future (proper instanced skeletal mesh, better support for VAT on player characters with Mass), but there’s nothing in the roadmap specifically at the moment. So I would suggest that if you need this for a current project, it would make sense to go ahead and implement it yourselves.
Thank you for your reply.
If you receive any information about the specific roadmap in the future, please let me know.
Thank you.
Unfortunately, we can’t reopen EPS threads once they have been closed for a few months, so I can’t update you with further information here in the future. What I’d recommend is to keep an eye on the release notes for each release. I would expect that any of these features would be mentioned if/when they are implemented. The other thing you can do, if you’re curious about the status, is to create another EPS at some point in the future and reference this one (or tag me) - that way it should be assigned to me and I’ll be able to update you at that point.