Using Displacement maps with Nanite

[Melvixz]

@Frenetic_Pony

Nanite is great, but hyper focused on one very specific asset class through one very specific art pipeline. Displacement would help a lot with all other cases, virtual heightfields too, so if tesselated displacement is going to be deprecated a replacement would be useful.

I wholeheartedly agree.

I personally find landscape system in ue4 to be outdated and welcome the introduction of nanite but what they need to do is find a way people can embed the displacement setup they make using materials to the static mesh imported into UE5.

If one sets up a mesh that has the bare minimum quads it needs in an external software and imports it into ue5, converts to nanite, subdivides it and bakes the displacement to the mesh from the material setup, disconnect the displacement node setup link to the material in the material editor since it is no longer needed as the displacement has been applied to the static mesh, this is better.

You can always change the displacement node setup especially where tiling is involved and re apply to the mesh and disconnect the setup after.

We also get to keep the file size down as we don’t need a high file size for mesh imported into UE5 and Nanite compresses the file size of this meshes after subdivision and the displacement is applied.

This is already possible with the modeling tools in UE5, we just need to find a way to use node setup from the material editor or maybe a material function?