what is up with Nanite UE5 v.s. goodbye Tessellation in UE4??

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I have been living under a rock and not followed the news recently, but what is up with nanite in UE5 v.s. goodbye to tessellation in UE4?

I really like the workflow of Tessellation, it gives me high detail in easy effort. Nanite looks like you have to sculpt every single asset to its extreem detail.
There is no way on earth that I can have such computing power to proces those high detail stuff, while Tessellation does give me some high detail AND is processing friendly.

Basically: does this mean, UE5 won’t be able to draw high details from the shaders using heightmaps? (while tessellation in UE4 does so)
All the best!
T

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You don’t need to sculpt anything, if you already have a heightmap (which you would need to use tessellation) then you can just subdivide a mesh and apply the heightmap as a displacement map and export it. It’s not as convenient, but you’ll get nicer results than you can currently get with regular tessellation.

I am hoping Epic will add a tessellate/displace option to the geometry modeling tools in engine, so that this doesn’t require constantly switching programs in the future. The modeling tools are improving fairly rapidly, as evidenced by the fact that the latest quixel scene’s building meshes were constructed mostly within UE4 using scan data.

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That is what i was afraid of. Even though you don’t have to sculpt, it still takes some 3d software to process and store such high detail work. My machine and my patience cannot handle this. :wink:

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You can use as much or as little geometry as necessary

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As being Unreal 5 we will not know until we see it and I’m not hearing that it no longer needs this or that but rather that UE5 does the necessary things for you as far as optimization goes. We already have this in UE4.X as far as landscapes goes, foliage tools, and texture streaming and even auto LOD’s where if you set the requirements UE4 handles the optimization requirements for you. This to me is what is meant by “it just works” as they are requirements of game design but since it’s a close edit environment why not let the engine handle the ditch digging

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The big problem is not the back and forth with the 3D program, but the huge blow to vertex painting. I think it’s a significant setback to production as there is really no replacement to that level of iteration and efficiency.

It was mentioned in the official stream that nanite integration for landscape is currently underway. Now, there is no way they are going to exclude blending materials with displacement on the landscape - that’s plain unusable. So they are bound to resolve this nanite vs world offset position conflict sooner or later. I just hope the solution extends to static meshes as well.

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