There's no way to use Quixel materials that have displacement on UE5?

Now that tesselation is deprecated, how to i use those materials (like this roof texture below) with Nanite? I cannot find options to do Tesselation or Displacement on UE5. Do i really need to work with dense meshes for every object on my scenes?

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I would like to know this as well, specially when working with Quixel surfaces where you could blend with displacement, doing that in an external program now will take twice as along

Technically speaking, you can generate a tessellated mesh and import that into UE.

Yeah i am having the same problem. I really hope they can add texture based displacement to nanite otherwise all the displacement textures will be useless. this really interrupts the workflow for archvis. i have a hard time believing unreal will expect people to sculpt every brick and tile dent into all there models. this would essentially make unreal datasmith for low poly programs like sketchup useless.

Using the Modeling Tools inside the Engine, you can create your mesh starting from a displacement Map.
Take a look to this video at 3:43 :

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Iā€™ve tried using world position offset to reach the effect that displacement should do, it turns out quite buggy like flickering and stretched on landscape. Hope thereā€™s a solution for nanite on landscape.

World position offset doesnt work with lumen neither nanite

blur the normals a small bit to get a smoother maping

You can use Virtual Heightfield Mesh. This is a tutorial on how to do that for landscapes. But it can be applied to static meshes as well.

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Is there some proper tutorial for using Virtual Heightfields for landscape displacement? The tutorial youā€™ve attached is incredibly crappy unfortunately :confused:

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What do you mean by crappy. Have you tried even following those steps. And if you are a power user there is a example maps in the plugin directory as well.

I watched this yesterday - shows you how to make use of the megascans displacement materiel. Bit of a fudge but it works. How to use Displacement in Unreal Engine 5 - YouTube

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In one part of the tutorial, he just opens editor widget blueprint with a huge ā€œset it up for meā€ button, clicks it and it sets up half a tutorial worth of stuff for him, without taking even one sentence to explain what he did. He also commonly just says ā€œyou have to enable this checkboxā€ without actually explaining what the checkbox does. Thatā€™s not how tutorials should be made. You can roughly see what he did, but not why :confused:

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It is not specified but he uses stuff from his ā€œopen landā€ project. He simply explain how to use his stuff rather than really explaining how to do it from scratch. You can still download it (the link is the video description) and check what he did.
Iā€™m still waiting for a tutorial that explain from scratch (I tried by myself, already knowing how to use virtual textures in UE 4, but with no success), no doubt somebody will come up with something soon.

Actually, you missed the point. Thatā€™s about adding the Virtual Texture Support. If I was explaning that from the scratch, thatā€™s another topic for 30-60 minute content. Most of the landscape material have RVT support & there are a ton of good tutorials if you are starting from Scratch.

In OpenLand we have a OneClick RVT setup. So, I simply use that to save time. The point here is to showcase how to use Virtual HeightField Mesh, but not to show how to setup RVT.

He also commonly just says ā€œyou have to enable this checkboxā€ without actually explaining what the checkbox does

Most of those are self-explanatory. Basically, those are adding plugins and enabling virtual texture, etc. I once showed something about ā€œRVT cacheā€ & explained that later.

Yeah! I understand that & itā€™s intentional. I donā€™t work for Epic & I am promoting OpenLand for sure. But I was trying to explain how things are working as possible as I can.

Anyway, OpenLand is available on GitHub & I am happy to help anyone on how to setup HFMesh if they ask specific questions. Rather than just saying itā€™s a crappy tutorial.
(Check my video for 4.26 for such examples)


Anyway, the biggest issue here is how Epic is handling this situation. Earlier tessellation is just a few steps away. But now with HFMesh, itā€™s not that simple. There are so many things to setup & understand.

My goal is to add HFMesh support with a OneClick solution for OpenLand & try to explain & help others to set it up as possible as I can.

Hope Unreal Sensei or others to do a better tutorial on this topic. Until that, this is all you get :smiley:

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I indeed followed your video about 4.26, downloaded open land to check it, but I was trying to replicate for UE5, and couldnā€™t make it work. I need to try again with your UE5 version.

Yes, you gently answered to me, but it didnā€™t work despite your advice and I didnā€™t want to abuse more of your time so I gave up at the end :laughing:

No worries. Happy to help again. I feel the pain.

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how will that work for static meshes? the virtual heightfield is a plane

It will work for static mesh as well just like a Landscape. You need to setup RVT support for the static mesh. Anyway, it will work best for static meshes with landscape like usage.

But, Virtual HeighField Mesh is not a solution for doing displacements for smaller objects, wall hangings & most of the Archviz related static meshes.

Here basically, we donā€™t have a proper solution which is similar to tessellation. Here are some options for you:

  • Bake those details with some example program or Unrealā€™s Mesh Modeling Plugin. Then use it as a nanite mesh.
  • You could technically get a high-poly mesh & use World Position Offset(WPO) to do displacements. Then you have to use traditional LOD setup. Nanite does not support WPO.

you mean ā€˜imprintingā€™ the static meshes into the landscape right? i.e. rendering the mesh as part of the landscape. but not actually using a virtual heightfield instead of a 3D mesh, without any landscape whatsoever. the virtual heightfield is still a heightmap, not 3d geometry

rendering meshes into the landscape RVT height sounds good in theory but in practice since itā€™s still a plane with displacement you lose a lot of definition at the edges of the mesh, and any non-convex areas just become vertical walls.

but I think the matter at hand here is still about displacing meshes, not displacing the landscape (which is covered by virtual heightfield).

TL;DR there is no solution currently but Epic said they want to explore and to try to provide similar functionality in a future release of UE5