Somewhat on topic - does anyone know details about nanite tessellation ? How do they work ? It seems it doesn’t have a precompute step. You just activate the command and instantly the mesh is tessellated and deformed.
Can you adjust the subdivisions ? As in - adjusting the quality.
Because this instant displacement seems to solve a problem I thought I need to solve by buying 128 GB RAM just so I can displace rocks and large things in 3ds max. I tested the offline displacement speed in Unreal 5.2 - but it was equally as slow as 3ds max but with less control on the quality and details. So I figured I need to take the mesh in 3ds max , add displacement - wait for 10 minutes or more until 3ds max calculates the thing, and using 40 GB or more of RAM, and then export to Unreal.
But this instant displacement / tessellation seem to bypass all this heavy workflow.
The biggest issue is that it’ll really vary quite a lot of the specific. POM cost can vary greatly while Nanite is fairly consistent regardless of inputs. Anecdotally, I have found that a well optimized POM material with shadows performed similarly to Nanite when occupying 100% of screen space.
Visually, both had pros and cons, but overall I would say Nanite was the winner. This is because while technically POM offers per pixel displacement which is arguably superior to per vertex displacement, this is counteracted by losses due to artifacts (either stairsteps of not dithering samples or blurriness of dithering).
Nanite being sharp and artifact free was enough to set it above.
I found an unoptimized POM material will perform worse than Nanite (for example using trilinear filtering on the height map will significantly increase hidden sample counts and slow down the material a lot).
POM is also harder to naturally blend across materials of a landscape, because there is no guarantee that the heightmap will intersect at the blend point, causing floating artifacts.
Also as mentioned previously, Nanite will natively support shadow mapping - POM shadows are quite hacky inferior.
My grievance isn’t just with Epic. It’s with people sheeping out on the Nanite documentation when it says to enable it on everything possible except skys.
Just use good textures paired with fake occlusion tricks.
I love showing this comparison because shows 2 things:
It’s looks impressive enough just using textures for detail, and it doesn’t destroy the framerate.
It only uses 60-69% of 3060 at 1080px60fps. Thats plenty of headroom for Lumen which is undoubtedly the most visual game changer to environments.
And I’m posting this for anyone who come to your thread. I appreciate this thread as this can be a place where people can learn.
I might come off annoying, but I sincerely care about what people read in terms of information.
