Unreal Engine 5 Tesselation alternative for Skeletal Mash

Hey do anyone know an alternative whay to use Displacement maps in Unreal engine 5?. Becouse i used Diplacement maps on skeletal mesh for a long time and i don´t know why thay removed tesselation in UE5 but it creats so much Problams and i realy can´t find any solution.

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Hey there @J3lueDeamon! Welcome back to the community! So generally people tend to just use the world position offset node now. I understand the deprecation of tessellation has been a bit of a shift, as I had only ever used the tessellation method for displacement myself. Here’s a little tutorial on how to use that node pin.

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Hi thanks for the answer, but the Problam is that this tutorial shows just how displacement works and not how the Tesselation in UE5 works. The Video uses a Highpoly Mesh and just add displacement to the already existing Vertices but all UE4 Mash are low Poly so thay just blow up. Tesselation was used to add vertices to the Mesh, and these new Vertices were used for the Displacement. So its still the Problam how could i get Tesselation to a Skeletal mesh ,the Displacement part is still the same

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Sorry to hear that! With the removal of Tessellation in 4.27 I believe the goal going forward was to lean on Nanite for high poly mesh solutions, however Skeletal Meshes don’t yet have Nanite Compatibility so that makes it a bit harder to pull off. The way they got around this in Valley of the Ancients was to have nanite meshes attached to a basic SKM, but that’s not scalable and definitely not effective for deforming characters. I don’t believe there’s a standard alternative for that workflow in 5.03 as of yet.

Thanks for the reply, but that’s exactly what I thought, but now I know. I already redesigned some of my mesh and retexture tham. I will try to Create these effect with Parrallx occlusion only from above down ore something. But i was creating a Dragon creater and to Mask diffrent Scales and Horn Types on Top off Morphtargets in Face the Nanite mash wouldn´t be an alternative, becouse the Displacement will project the Morpf target 0 position along the Vertex Normal and can´t be handeled with the UV map. May you and your Buddys find a way to bring Tesselation back and Hopefully I’ll finish my first project at some point ,:smiley:

Understandable! Just know we hear you guys’ feedback! Hopefully a full solution for SKMs will present itself in the future. I do remember seeing a community project to port Tessellation from 4.27 to 5.X and I was going to recommend it if you have source experience but it seems to have disappeared. Apologies!

Epic needs to bring tesselation back or give us a valid alternative for skeletal meshes. I used skeletal mesh tesselation / displacement a lot in my projects and I bet other people do so too.

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Hey there @hGosling! There’s been a good bit of headway to the “Alternative” end! As of 5.1 World Position Offset is supported for Nanite meshes. This is the first step in being able to bring Nanite to SKMs. That said, there is more work to do before that so stay tuned and sorry about the disruption!

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I have the same problem.
Did you find any solution meanwhile?
How did you go forward?

it has been a year any updates? I guess just normal maps is the best that can be done?

Hey there @0xKami! Unfortunately I believe Nanite isn’t quite ready for SKMs as of yet, though (as of 5.3)Nanite Spline Meshes are currently in alpha which is a solid chunk of work towards deforming nanite meshes at runtime, which is a technical precursor to more advanced uses.

For now it seems normals and displacement will have to do for deformable SKMs unless the Valley of the Ancients method of Nanite SMs being manipulated by bones works for your use case.

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I believe we’re getting a bit off-topic. The question is not how to convert SKMs into Nanite Meshes. The question is why Tesselation is gone? Nanite and Tesselation are not interchangeable but rather like ints and floats; they have overlaps, but you can’t simply delete ints because you now consider floats more important. High-poly meshes that are not configurable in shaders or render targets and are useless in third-party programms cannot be the final alternative. Why does one even believe they can make a better decision about what should be used across projects without having the alternative and that ther is no need for an Option ? So why doesn’t Tesselation come back?

I completely understand! I agree that nanite doesn’t cover all of the tessellation use cases, and while nanite is slowly taking some more of the tessellation use cases over with time, I know it’s not a full replacement. I just offer the alternatives I have on hand, as I am unfortunately unable to bring tessellation back myself, however I do pass over community notes when it’s brought up!

Similarly, I also need to use the skeletal mesh Displacement map to increase the details of the skeletal mesh. If I use UE to make videos, I really need the surface subdivision of the material to do the displacement.

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