Manually placing Nanite Static Meshes in a level seems to perform the same as creating a blueprint to instance the same number of Nanite Static Meshes.
Does Nanite benefit at all from instancing?
I tested this, made a Blueprint with an array of Nanite Static meshes. Somehow performance dropped by about 10 fps. Even though I couldn’t manually add as many Nanite SM by hand, no matter how many I placed in the scene, performance never dropped.
Right, but that’s not instancing 
What is instancing then?
Now… whats supposedly going on in engine is that the engine automatically instances meshes…
Someone turned on their brain and decided it was better if the engine automatically instanced the same meshes - according to what i remember reading, anyway.
My 2c is - instance things manually. Always.
Its not like you can migrate the instanced stuff to a different engine or anything cool like it, but should any regression or issue occur with the engine, having the instances done manually will prevent the regression or issue from affecting your project…
To instance stuff manually you want to add items to HirearchicalInstancedStaticMeshComponent (HISM) or whatever they call it in 5…
Something strange recently.
I have a maze ( a new one ) with a lot of fence/gate posts, which have interchangeable tops.
I instanced them, being a good boy.
Later, to make the configuration of them easier, I changed them to blueprints. My fps jumped about 20 frames.
WTF?
That is what I use to make a BP that instances nanite meshes. Also, there are some material nodes that only work on instanced meshes; for example the “Per Instance Random” node.
