I noticed that nanite doesn’t help much on an empty level with just a few low poly meshes (actually, it hurts performance if enabled on the low poly meshes).
So, I was wondering if enabling Nanite on low poly meshes would help on an already heavy Nanite environment, or I would see the same slight drop in performance as seen on an empty level?
Best regards,
Zananok
Yes, generally Epic has suggested to enable Nanite on any and everything that you can - even low poly meshes. Especially if you are using virtual shadow maps. VSMs are significantly more expensive when using non-nanite geometry.
All of that is very true, the specific cases they get for not using Nanite are meshes that have broad, unoccluded triangles like a skydome, even then it can be very useful. VSMs are, as @BananableOffense noted, a significant cost for non-nanite.
I am a little confused about Nanite. If it is virtualized geometry and virtualizes itself on low poly assets, why is there a need to import meshes with higher poly counts? Why not just skip importing hi quality assets, import low or mid quality assets, enable Nanite, and let it virtualize in the extra geometry?
Nanite doesn’t add geometry, it takes it away.
Adding detail would require it to know what that detail should be, which would require authoring the higher quality models to bake that data into displacement maps anyway.