Is it a good idea to convert landscape to static mesh and then enable nanite, so that you could remesh it and discplace with the texture of the landscape?
It would defeat the purpose of all the landscape tools and optimizations
but yeah
you can export the landscape height map and use it in blender/maya to displace a mesh for the landscape.
but normally you wouldn’t except for distant rocks/hills
Edit: If you found this post by searching you should be aware that my original reply was written for an old version of the engine specifically in the context of IMPORTING a mesh to use as a landscape.
Newer versions of UE5 (5.1+) have a Nanite option for landscape actors, which you should be using instead of importing your own landscape meshes. Afaik it retains the heightfield/collision representation of the landscape actor so it does not suffer from the drawbacks I’ve listed in my original answer.
Click to see my original answer
Really a bad idea to import a mesh to use as landscape for so many reasons:
- Collision would be expensive and terrible
- You’d lose the heightfield representation of the landscape used for Lumen/Distance fields
- The mesh distance field would have horrible resolution unless you divided it up into hundreds of meshes
- Iteration times would be abysmal, imagine having to change something and you have to go through the nightmare of generating the mesh and importing it all over again.
The ue5-main branch currently has an experimental implementation of using Nanite to render landscapes but it remains to be seen whether it is actually performant and makes sense to do this. There are other options for high resolution landscapes, namely virtual heightfield meshes. But this is experimental too. It feels like the landscape system in Unreal is in a bit of a state of limbo right now, where Epic is exploring their options to find the best approach to move forward with.
1 Like
Is this assessment still accurate? Collision can be handled totally independent of rendering. (The existing landscape had no special collision other than a static heightfield did it?) Does Lumen work the the existing Landscape? Is that a new 5.1 thing?
Neither Valley of the Ancients and Matrix used Landscape. Enabling Landsape AND Nanite results in poor performance.
If you were making a new game in UE 5 today - would you still use Landscape?
Anyone know if there is any new Nanite Landscape features coming in 5.1?
Thanks for any additional thoughts/feedback
1 Like
you are right. I am currently testing the Landscape for VR.
Since I can’t convert directly the Landscape to Nanite… well… it’s too expensive.
I also think, once you have a landscape created and the form and size is nailed.
You kinda need to convert into Nanite, otherwise, VR is dead.
Enable Nanite in Landscape
if u are dev for quest
yeah
but pcvr is fine with nanite
you have to decide
if you dev pcvr
you can use anything the user’s rig can handle
if you dev for quest
you have to scale things down to the adreno level
Old Topic I know… how do you get this to work, I have it enabled in 5.2 Preview 2 but the Landscape doesnt show as Nanite in the Editor?
Same here, I enable nanite for the landscape. But no difference.
In the Nanite visualizer there is no change at all.
Many thanks for answers.
Have a good week.
1 Like
Perhaps this might help? Nanite Virtualized Geometry in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation
Did you click the “Rebuild Data” button after toggling Nanite on?
I found the Landscape size needs to be tiny, few cells else it does not work. Fortnite must be using some special stuff