In this talk from 2 weeks ago, in the section about planned Nanite improvements, they actually said, quote:
So with all the features, starting with Nanite, so the big focus of the year is to do R&D into foliage rendering. So the problem with foliage is, that if you have a huge amount of trees going up to the horizon, you know, the Nanite algorithm doesn’t work that well because it just becomes a problem of aggregation of all these leaves etc, so we’re looking at all kinds of approaches to render that kind of geometry detail at speed in the far distance, etc.
But the other aspect of it as well is that in close to you, next to the camera, there will be a lot of moving elements, right. If you see the trees, the trees are moving etc, so for that we are exploring Nanite skeletal meshes which is actually hitting experimental already in 5.5. And that’s really exciting because we’re running all that on the GPU so we can offload all that stuff from the CPU which is much faster to render and even instance animations and such things.
and
Going forward, we plan to gonna keep doubling down on the foliage thing, we expect really big updates at around 5.6 time, which is next year, middle next year
That’s great to hear!
Timestamped Link: https://youtu.be/s1qdbJtjUI0?t=5498