Hi
Like this, using a panner with a heightmap attached. It would be great if we could do this in UE5 like we could in UE4.
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This is what that quad-tree primitive they gave us is designed to correct. We have the right prim now, it’s moreso how to push the material to tell it what to do.
I’m Lavin’ it!
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Waite. Did they seriously get rid of tessilation?
Like there are a BILLION uses for tessilation that you can NOT just toss a nanite object in there.
This cant be real.
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There are work arounds using VirtualRuntimeTextureOutput in your material, enable plugin of VirtualHeightfieldmesh, enable VirtualTextureSupport in project settings. Then you have to create a VirtualRuntimeTexture and set it to height, then create a VirtualRuntimeTextureVolume and set it to the size of your map. Blah blah blah. 20 steps later IT IS A COMPLETE NIGHTMARE, then once I got it working I realized HOLY ****, it is VIRTUAL, so the player walks through everything instead of on top. Looks good for Cinematic scene, worthless for in game applications. I am no where close to a pro, maybe I missed something, but it is a nightmare. I literally stopped using UE5 and went back to UE4.
Tessellation has the same exact issue. All shader based solutions will.
You need to make sure you pipe something to world position offset of your landscape. The heightmesh has no collision and only z-axis deformation; this is what allows it to basically ‘skip’ (or not be considered-for) parts of the rendering stack, like say, collision, and offer a performance-advantage.
The landscape the heightmesh is sourced from is your collision. You can make them the same height, or of you just choose to push your world-height into the heightmesh only, it will always be heigher than the underlying (lol) landscape.
Make sure you keep both things mind and in/out of sync as you desire.
It’s possible to have different information being sent to each so you can walk on top of the heightmesh (faithfully respect height information) and still have things to walk through like snow, etc:
For those who want static mesh displacement Quixel have made handy tutorial/demo of Displacement in the Modelling Plugin.
I heard that Nanite was incompatible with skinned meshes. Is that true?
Modeling tools won’t cut it, we need runtime.
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Refer here: Nanite Virtualized Geometry in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation
Since there is a pre-computed element to Nanite it would make sense that skeletal meshes, which can deform in many different ways might not be supported.
So most basic - there are simple player-mesh cases (hair, body, clothing, props) on a controlled or NPC character where you would use tessellation as part of the character material.
This has NOTHING to do with Nanite, which does not handle player meshes.
So, here, there is now no solution, just requires higher Poly…thanks…
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No professional would ever even consider using tessellation on characters.
Whether or not they considered it is irrelevant. The fact is is that professionals did use it on characters in UE4 and do use it in other paradigms.
Your point is entierly irrelevant.
They removed tessellation.
Period.
They can’t even be bothered to fix bugs reported 10 years + ago.
Do you really think complaining about tessellation with nonsense claims, which by the way have no ground to stand on, is going to achieve anything?
No.
Not only it won’t, it also makes you look rather silly to be quite honest.
There is about 1000 reasons no one would ever even consider tessellation on skeletal meshes.
Yet here you are claming that “developers use them”.
No. Real developers would never.
Some eejit making an amature-palooza game? Sure, why not. We have all seen them do way worse.
Thats still no excuse for laying down random BS which other people can possibly read and propagate.
You yourself here detail a case where in fact a professional would be using tessellation on a character. The 4.27 manual docs online have a section on use of tessellation and how it can smooth out rough edges.
Now, websites like Texturing XYZ have developed multi channel normal map and displacement channels for applying high fidelity detail to characters, and Qixel assets also had displacement. in UE5 World Displacement was also removed. As it had similar mesh altering functionality like that of the Tessellation Multiplier channel, it was basically marked deprecated due to Nanite’s introduction.
Furthermore, many assets in the Marketplace can look better being optimized by tessellation smoothing, or by applying displacement to the material. So, it will have been the knowledgeable professional developer that understands how these all can be used.
Now, I concur with the overall sentiment regarding responsiveness, but just because we dislike the idea that Epic has not been responsive in other cases does not de-facto mean they will not be responsive here. This thread and others like it have various users speaking of the value they saw with Tessellation. If users believe it is a valuable toolset, and likewise a detriment that it was removed, we must relay that message to them.
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You can relay on any message you like.
They won’t listen.
Really, they never have.
The eggheads behind the executive decisions have been screwing this engine up worse and worse for the past 3 years.
Maybe when there’s no one left but amateures using it, and they see it due to a huge loss of revenue… maybe then they’ll change.
Realistically that’s just not happening. Fortnite works, they dgaf about anything else.
It likely won’t do any good even if we got 5k posts in a single thread, but its good to remind the people that the leadeship behind the engine is just eggheads who don’t actually use the engine for anything except cartoonish unoriginal stuff.
I feel like not many developers realize that this is the same company that sues little kids (minors) families into the ground for cheating - while getting sued for stealing the gameplay off other games.
Having reminders of that is important too albeit completely off topic in regards to the lack of a tesselation option.
Don’t think I’ve ever witnessed anyone use TexturingXYZ maps for anything other than rendering still images in an offline renderer. (Or adding detail to zbrush sculpts they’re just going to bake down…)
Or why anyone might pay 8bucks for a texture set when Quixel is free…
They do use them in UE. Just Google TexturingXYZ and Unreal Engine. But to your point, why would anyone use them in still images if they had no purpose, or you could use just a normal map - It’s because displacement does enhance the transfer realism better than a normal map alone.
Also think about it - if you bake HD detail to a mesh, that raises its poly count, making an item more compute heavy. Now this is fine if Nanite handles character / player meshes. But it does not. And then, if you merely convert a displacement channel to normal channel, you reduce opportunity for realism.
UE had a way to employ normal maps and displacement on a lower poly mesh, and they removed displacement with the hope that Nanite will affect character meshes at some point. But now you are (a) relying on the normal map to give detail on a low poly mesh, and (2) you used to have this great tool to enhance detail, and now you don’t. How is this an enhancement - It is not, it is a decrease in ability and performance factor. No one is saying get rid of nanite and bring back tessellation and displacement. What is being said is bring back tessellation and displacement with nanite.
Would anyone have a problem with Epic bringing this back…If Epic brought back Tessellation and Displacement to UE5, while still having Nanite, would a segment of users in protest stop using UE5.