Nanite and spline mesh component

Development Rendering
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1

Hi all,

is it possible to use nanite mesh with spline mesh component? I tried but I have a low poly mesh instead the nanite mesh. Thank you for your help

2

Nanite doesn’t support deformation, and spline meshes deform a mesh.

You should also be aware that spline meshes don’t have distance fields so you won’t get great results with Lumen if you use them.

3

thank you Arkiras for your help. :wink:

so if I need to use nanite mesh I have to manually deform it previously, right?
is this the better way to work in UE5?
Thank you

4

You can do stuff in Houdini and bake it out to nanite. But it would be really nice to have an inbuilt “bake to nanite” button in engine, or even better just plain support for spline meshes and geometry nodes.

5

yep thank you

6

late but there is merge actor inside unreal that convert the spline mesh in normal static mesh ready for nanite.

7

I’ve been exploring this as well. It works fine for many cases but not mine unfortunately.

Adding details in case devs are listening…

For example, I have a long winding car tunnel section. If do a merge and convert it Nanite I get a lot of glitchy flickering geo and it also doesn’t seem to build distance fields for Lumen correctly. I can try to merge smaller chunks but it starts to defeat the purpose at some point.

I tried to automate that process by creating a Blutility that would merge small portions of a complex spline mesh, convert it to Nanite and place back in the level. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anyway to access the “Merge Actor” features in Blutility (just “Merge Mesh Actors”).

8

I didn’t have any error in my bridge but I did tried to make a BP to convert automatic to nanite , there wasn’t a node to do merge actor (mesh component)

Had to gather all spline mesh component, create an actor, set the mesh the same as the spline mesh component, then use the node merge actor … it worked awfully :joy:. No deformation.

If u find out how to get the mesh component from the spline with the deformation and bake to mesh, please share. Must have a mesh description or maybe copy it t a dynamic mesh .

9

just an update, its working now for me.

made a blueprint widget,
i copy the nanite mesh, turn off nanite on the copy, make my crazy spline, press save and bake the deformed mesh to nanite. (all the process inside blueprint, the designer have no idea what is happening).
i also can break the nanite back to spline as i save the data inside the actor.

10

Hi,

Any chance that you might share your work?
Just a few questiosn as well, are you deforming the spline mesh and then do your stuff and get to enable nanite on the deformed mesh all in runtime?

11

I need to check if I can share or not.

Is an utility widget , so it only work in the editor, the designer press “create spline” , i spawn an actor spline, then they select a mesh (nanite on or off doesn’t matter, the tool turn the nanite enable off when is on use ), create the spline (deformed mesh), press save (output is a nanite mesh that is used in runtime).

Pretty sure it won’t work on run time, you can’t create a mesh and turn on nanite on run time.
For creating the mesh on runtime it must be dynamic mesh (no nanite).

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12

Thank you very much for your help :wink:

13

5.3 added support for this with “r.Nanite.AllowSplineMeshes=1” on your DefaultEngine.ini for the project.

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14

Thanks for this. Seems nanite displacement isn’t working on spline meshes for me. Anyone else?

15

i havent checked in 5.4, but in 5.3 it definently had problems… I ended up converting all my spline geometry to non nanite, merging it down into a new mesh and finally making that new mesh nanite.

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16

It’s working for me but it’s also heavy on performance, so it needs some more time.

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