The case of landscape is already covered by using the new virtual heightfield mesh.
I’m worried about the other potential use cases though: using tiling textures and trim sheets for environment assets and wanting relief detail out of it, but still being able to modify the tiling easily (impossible if the detail is baked into the mesh). And possible effects like snow buildup, though I suspect that will be possible with WPO with dense enough meshes.
indeed Nanite is an alternative to static mesh component. and indeed it’s gradually streaming triangles based on screen visibility. A friend of mine insists it’s like thinking of mesh geometry density the same way you’d think of texture mipmaps (not sure if that’s entirely accurate but it’s a good analogy)
IIRC It was stated at the time of the demo that it was only for static meshes with static mobility, and at that time also not supporting WPO-animation, and also not supporting meshes with masked alpha (they have plans for it but we’ll see). Basically a no-go to use on vegetation, and in retrospective becomes evident why most things in that demo were full solid and static objects