Thanks, didn’t realize the Docs were up.
I think the confusing thing though is, as stated in the Doc: “Nanite should generally be enabled wherever possible. Any Static Mesh that has it enabled will typically render faster, and take up less memory and disk space.”
@LumberingTroll
While sure, I should still be making appropriate high poly meshes that aren’t going to have clipping faces and such, is the whole idea, at this point, to just strictly use meshes with millions of polys?
A large part of Nanite is that it doesn’t need baked Normal maps, which means that the whole High Poly - > Low Poly → Bake workflow is cut down to just making a High Poly and letting Nanite do the rest of the work (within reason; of course I still expect to have to make a clean mesh, delete unnecessary faces, etc.)?
Low poly, at this point, is just going to be for things that wouldn’t have a high poly version anyway? Like if I had some skyscraper in the distance that the player would never get to. That could be 5k polys and I’d never create a detailed mesh for that to begin with because no one will ever get close. So that can be kept as a low poly mesh, but everything in front of the player can now directly be a high poly one.
I think it’s just the shock of what Nanite is proposing that’s making it a bit hard to grasp. For the past several years it’s been necessary to use low poly with baked detail, so to be told that the engine can handle high poly models directly is odd. It feels like there should be some catch.
Perhaps I’m just being really paranoid though.
@SeveralBees
I tested out some meshes as well. I had a 1.5 mil cliff that I sculpted in Mudbox, exported it to 3ds max, unwrapped UVs, then sent it to Mixer. After the materials were done, I put it into UE5, built a Nanite and it placed it into a scene. Then I placed around 2000 of them around and there wasn’t even a minor slow down as I was walking around using a Third Person Character.
So with that rough 5 minute test that didn’t have any manual optimization or even that clean of a mesh, there’s definitely a pretty good result.
I think the process that took the longest was the unwrapping and the actual Import.
I get what you mean though, when you were talking about Zbrush. That was something that I was trying to really grasp to. What exactly should my Nanite workflow be?
But I guess, for the most part, I can just sculpt a mesh, clean it, and then push it to Mixer or another such program and export to UE5.
@anonymous_user_b537cab31
Yeah I just wanted to verify since this isn’t a typical workflow.
The idea of unwrapping and creating UVs 3 million poly meshes just seemed like such an uncomfortable thing to do since it’s not the norm.
I mean I’m amazed that we’re at a point where we can directly use high poly meshes. I just mean that I wouldn’t have expected it would actually be that straightforward.
@losses
From what I’ve gathered, it really is just unwrapping the high poly and using that as your base mesh (while still maintaining proper geometry).
I was in the same position as you though; I wanted to know what to do with already created high poly meshes.
I had many that I wouldn’t deem “game ready” so to speak.
But with some minor editing, just like I would a low poly, they could be used.
The most difficult part will probably be actually working with this models in terms of what polygons to keep, which to delete, etc.