No one is addressing the elephant in the room about skeletal mesh, nanite does not work for skeletal mesh, and tessellation did. UE5 is more like a experimental downgrade than a production ready engine IMO, but anyway when I need tessellation I just use Unity…
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Many ArchViz users will also stay away from UE5 due to lack of tessellation. We need a quick way of achieving 3D effects on more complex but “flat” surfaces and the ability to change/scale/rotate materials with displacement. The current workflow in UE5 is too time-consuming and doesn’t work with timeframes of many architectural projects.
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This isn’t very time-consuming at all:
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That’s a neat trick, but nowhere near as easy/fast to apply to multiple objects at the same time.
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Yeah, also not very useful for several square km landscapes 
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And there’s where virtual heightfields come in to play
Please Epic… Reintroduce tessellation, there are too many pipeline jobs that depends on tessellating from material.
ive tried everything for bypassing in a specific pipeline of mine but there is no way.
in example, rendering an entire library of assets previews via blueprint , ive tried with geometry scripts but the " Event on Rebuild Generated Mesh " get triggered only when modifications occur on "viewport or editor " manually … for example loading a new texture for heightmap and pushing it via asset import task , will not fire the event until i phisically move the asset or change some parameter in the editor.
PLEASE Epic… make a step forward ( i know for you guys is backward ) and reintroduce the tesselation and displacement in the material !
while Praying for it every night…
Regards
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I located the commit that removed tessellation from the engine:
https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/commit/55e13e764e662d8405c554123be465b1d0e1d669
I was considering the attempt of adding tessellation back as well as an improved LPV for a way cheaper GI. It would be passable with skyatmosphere/realtime skylight for game usage.
https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/commit/53bdcb2ff426279a9cdd894d16c78a64e01f995a
I am just unsure if it is worth the time investment but will post if it seems feasable,
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You must login to github with your Epic Acct,
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You know, the more and more I read about this, it is so odd that Bump Offset, World Position Offset, and Parallax Occlusion Materials (“POM”) were in fact left in UE5, while Tessellation/Displacement were removed. Instead of looking at why Tessellation/Displacement were removed, look at it from the other angle - shouldn’t Bump Offset, World Position Offset, and POM materials also be removed too?
They all attempt a visual mesh deformation, like Tessellation/Displacement. And according to reasons cited for deprecation of Tess/Displacement, they are all likewise older material editor tools which, technically speaking, could be replaced by a HD mesh paradigm rendered by Nanite…
So consistent with removal of Tessellation/Displacement, shouldn’t we see a removal of POM node, World Offset in material editor, and Bump Offset node?
Moreso, why stop there - shouldn’t Normal in material editor, and Bump/Height map nodes, both which attempt simulation of HD mesh details,via material editor, all be eliminated to make way exclusively for meshes rendered in HD and rendered at low-cost via Nanite?
At first one may think they should not be deprecated.
Indeed, I would be a big proponent of seeing them come back…
But it just starts to make no sense now the more and more you review and see just how many other tools and nodes just like Tessellation and Displacement still remain, so you begin to see more clearly what likely was the case -
They probably were not able to make it work.
If I had to guess now, they likely would love to have had Tessellation/Displacement in there for us. Some would dismiss them as ‘obsolete’, etc, but why not, there are too many other obsolete variants along the same lines - POM, Bump Offset, Parallax Occlusion, World Offset, which for some reason are still there?..
Likely, it just was no longer possible without serious conflicts. (ie Lumen wouldn’t render it well, or Nanite wasn’t able to manage it). And we are likely seeing the latter half of the story, that removal was the cleanest option.
No. If you’d read any of the multiple responses by Epic on their reasoning for deprecating it then you would know this.
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That only speaks to the topic of mesh. But no one anywhere stated that Nanite would replicate the animation components of Tessellation and Displacement. See, reviewing you find now that Nanite has nothing to do with material animation. Tessellation and Displacement, as material components, on the other hand could be animated, panned, turned on-off, flickered, warped, increased and decreased in intensity, scaled, etc, etc…all in a BP in real-time, on a sequenced timeline, and more.
If Tessellation and Displacement are deprecated by Nanite’s ability to render high poly meshes, then World Position Offset, Parallax Occlusion Materials, an Bump Offset are also deprecated by Nanite’s ability to render high poly meshes…but they weren’t removed?..
I point this out to those who want it back. Think broadly here - think of all the nodes in UE that are probably obsolete for the bulk of us, but they are still in engine. Now think of all the myriad of ways you could animate Displacement and Tessellation as a material component - you wouldn’t remove this feature-rich animation component if you didn’t have to. They likely had to axe for compatibility reasons.
It’s too bad for UE5 users- World Position Offset (limited to mesh poly), Parallax Occlusion Materials (not able to deform edges), an Bump Offset (2D only) do not come close to the level of 3D-edge deformation detail, via a texture map, made possible by Tessellation and Displacement. I recently tried them all, I can tell they were left in likely because they indeed do not have the engine cost that Tessellation and Displacement did. That engine stress with Tessellation and Displacement as animatable material editor components must have complicated UE5 too much, and with some aspects of them being deprecated by Nanite anyway, it was expedient to eliminate them.