That´s it, thank you!
1 Like
On the note of Nanite trees actually, in addition to some testing I did earlier, I got to hear about Brian Karris’s (creator of Nanite) explaination of the limitations of Nanite with World Position Offset.
Essentially, in its’ current state, WPO won’t be the same ‘Takes whatever you can throw at it’ paradigm as vanilla Nanite. It will let you place a lot more instances of WPO geometry than the traditional pipeline (I’ve tested about 10x more supported w/Nanite than without), but it’s not really designed for ambient movment.
Basically, if you have a cartoon game and you want to hit an object and have it squash and stretch, Nanite supports that. That’s because it has to call up special shaders to do the WPO math compared to rigid geo, and those have a cost. But if you have world-persistant geometry, such as grass swaying in the wind, that’s a much worse use case, because Nanite can’t ever bring in the fast path processing.
So, Trees can be animated with Nanite, as long as there aren’t too many on-screen, or you disable WPO if they get far away.
I believe this has been updated in 5.1.
Did you ever find a solution for this?
To @CW_Designs point, update 5.1 includes Nanite support for foliage. Hilariously enough, the documents say it’s more performant to model individual leaves as geo than it is to use cards, as masked-out areas essentially cost as much as non-masked areas plus the overdraw.
Big thing the docs mention though: the current overdraw visualization will lie to you on foliage, it won’t be the correct cost.
Just jumping in here. I don’t think the WPO issue was updated as part of 5.1 and nanite veg. Or at least I can’t get wind animations working all with nanite foliage for instance.
Could be a SpeedTree issue, but even my custom rigged trees won’t animate when converted to nanite.
I believe nanite animation is only supported with WPO currently, and anything rigged in the traditional sense may not work. I got to hear a bit from Brian Karris on why, but part of it is that deformable nanite geo brings up a lot of topology questions that they don’t know how to answer yet. WPO is basically ‘skewing’ geometry in an intelligent way, not fully deforming it.
Yeah I’m using WPO to animate my branch planes and leaves, but am getting strange results no matter what values I use. With strange offsets applied and the animation running at “normal speed” or animating along the correct offset but at rapid pace.
I’ve left nanite veg alone for now. It also isn’t working with Speedtree’s implementation as far as I can tell.
Do you have examples of working nanite veg with working animations? I’ve not seen any that aren’t misbehaving.
I think Epic has a few demos, but you may want to look at the 5.1 nanite page for tips. Animated foliage is possible, but rather pricy in its’ current implementation.
Never mind, I fixed it.
Seems to be quite performant too.
Ended up using Speedtree’s implementation for wind. When you save from speedtree, save files as a .st9 file.
Then when imported to Unreal Engine, you need to go into theSpeedTreeWind blueprint and reduce the RippleSpeed by a factor of 10, which I’ve done simply by adding a multiply by 0.1 node.
You need to do the same for all Bend, Oscillation and Turbulence nodes for the branches and shared motion groups.
I’ve converted my vegetation assets to nanite, added them to the foliage painter and they all work.
Huh, that’s interesting, there’s a lot of over-occlusion happening. Do you have ‘preserve area’ on in the mesh settings?
Or lumen may not be active, either is possible.
You can ignore the lighting in this project, it’s set up for path-tracing.
Edit: I’ve also applied the same to other nodes. It looks like all values related to WPO.
I’ve seen the same in my own blueprints in 5.1/5.1.1
Did someone at Epic move a decimal point?