Hello.
I’ve been researching this for sometime now and I can’t find anything online about this, not from official UE, not from ‘Epic Games Dev Community’, or even from youtube.
While I’ve been able to successfully generate ‘Landscape HLOD’ with ‘World Partition’ and they work great by their own with no problems, when I enable ‘Landscape Nanite’ the far distance simplified mesh HLOD breaks, and I’m not talking about seams, but it literally breaks!!!
This happens even if I generate HLOD first and then enable Landscape Nanite, or the other way around, or even by changing the ‘HLOD Layer’ set up I get the same result.
Here is a Test Landscape that shows the issue:
My conclusion is that you can’t use ‘Landscape Nanite’ with ‘Landscape HLOD’, unless of course I’m missing something very obvious here.
Or am I correct in my assumption?
Nevermind, I managed to get this World Partition + Landscape Nanite + Landscape Nanite HLOD working with an incredible high quality result, and it increased the game’s performance by 30+ FPS on my most heavy level.
UE 5.4.1
UE documentation is a complete mess, I had to learn it the hard way.
The default EU5.4.1 open world template works with = World Partition + Landscape HLOD
Although, even that default template map has some issues and it’s not using Nanite which was my original problem. Generating Landscape HLOD using as an example/reverse engineer the default template map is not a viable option when you want both components to use Nanite, since as shown in the screenshots, things will just break.
But thanks to my extensive experience with game engines since 1994, I managed to make this work and have a fully working high quality result, which raised by 30+ FPS even my most heavy and demanding cell. And not following UE template as a guide, I had to go the other way around for this.
This is from the experiment/test project and the screenshots I took when I finally managed to achieved it. Maybe if I decide to make a video about it when I get some free time, I’ll post it here.
Proof of concept:
Great you have figured it out, that is, If the screenshot with the green tiles above are the mysterious landscape HLODs and you can build the project. Otherwise, unchecking the HLOD option on all landscape tiles is recommended.
If it works
What was so complicated for you?
What has to be done and is not properly documented in the 5.4 documentation?
Can you possibly provide any information to the community about what you did to make this work?
I assume part of it is ‘build the Landscape HLODs with Landscape Nanite disabled, then enable Landscape Nanite and build the Landscape Nanite data,’ but for the life of me I can’t get the first layer of HLODs to actually render as Nanite, no matter what settings I use (if Nanite is enabled on the Landscape, the generated HLOD meshes will be Nanite enabled, but they still won’t render as Nanite, instead using the low-poly Nanite fallback mesh, and look totally broken).
What I’m getting is:
Base Layer: Nanite disabled or enabled and built will look fine
HLOD Layer 1: If Nanite Landscape is enabled will look broken, generated meshes will show as Nanite Enabled in the mesh settings, won’t show as Nanite in the Nanite views in the world. If Nanite Landscape is disabled will look fine, but won’t be Nanite, even if ‘build nanite enabled mesh’ is enabled in the HLOD layer settings. Also, regardless of using Merged Mesh, Simplified Mesh, or Approximated Mesh the generated meshes will just be straight copies of the related landscape streaming proxy at it’s highest available level of detail.
HLOD Layer 2: Nanite Landscape Enabled at build time: visually broken, but WILL render as Nanite. Nanite Landscape disabled: Looks fine, and will render as Nanite if Nanite is enabled in the HLOD layer settings.
