Nanite: Everything You Should Know [Unreal Engine 5]
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 พ.ค. 2024
- Nanite is the all-new toy that was released with Unreal Engine 5. Epic Game's Virtualized Geometry is the way of the future, and in this tutorial we learn all about how to set it up, things to know about it, pros & cons/limitations, optimization viewmodes, LOD's, and when you should be using it. Realtime rendering just took a massive leap forward with this tech, and I am beyond excited.
Epic Livestream on Nanite:
• Nanite | Inside Unreal
#unrealengine5
#nanite
#realtimerendering
#epicgames
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This video is NOT sponsored. Some product links are affiliate links which means if you buy something I'll receive a small commission.
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Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro00:27 - Setup
01:31 - The Good To Know Stuff
04:40 - Pros & Cons/Limitations
09:23 - When Should You Use Nanite?
10:26 - Outro & Thanks
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![Things To Know About LUMEN [Unreal Engine 5]](/img/n.gif)
Man I truly appreciate how you took time with this video and learned everything there is to know about Nanite before making a video about it. Unlike some other youtubers that just took advantage of new release and made terrible uninformative Nanite videos without even understanding how Nanite works in the first place.
Thank you! I really appreciate that!
Yea this is the only video I've seen that actually explains how nanite works
it's great but for example when i activate it on trees, i just see the grey mesh without the skins, why is that?
Sensei?
Agree
Every video I've seen so far seems to suggest that Nanite will allow you to run AAA games at 4k using a Dorito based GPU form 2004.
I'm glad someone took time to highlight the shortcomings of Nanite.
Nanite is REALLY impressive, but it isn't magic.
Lmao @ Dorito-based GPU, you just made my day
@@WilliamFaucher Add a mountain dew liquid cooling system and I can see potential there.
@@BioClone now that’s a system for True GamersTM
it's great but for example when i activate it on trees, i just see the grey mesh without the skins, why is that?
@@WilliamFaucherI would eat them 😅
You can also select several meshes in Content Browser and right click, then click Nanite>Enable or >Disable in the context menu. Same as ticking the checkbox.
Oh that’s awesome! Thanks for sharing
@@WilliamFaucher Thanks for sharing all your knowledge
@@WilliamFaucher You can also add filter for static meshes on content browser, this will show all static meshes. You can then press Ctrl+A, which will select all static meshes in your content browser and convert all of them to Nanite at the same time.
@@Navhkrin Which will make your pc crash, especially for megascans lol, don't try 😂
@@azaelue5 It's okay let people try, maybe their PCs can handle it who knows
Instead saving stuff before doing things might be better lol
Absolutely excellent to get the rundown on this. I'm fairly certain they mentioned they were trying to get foliage done. It's clearly not going to work in the early access but hopefully a lot of those things like foliage, hair/fur and skeletal meshes can get supported by Nanite at or after the full release.
- Jamie
I've been really confused about nanite up till now. Great video, I'm really excited to go implement this new knowledge now.
Updated: In Unreal Engine 5.1 update nanite supports foliages (aggregate geometry)
Awesome content, technical enough to stand out and yet still very concise and clear. Thank you :-)
That was a great summary of the UE5 Inside session about nanite. Thanks :)
Thank you!
Oh yes I've been waiting for a video on this ever since I got ue5, thanks!
haha you're welcome!
Just found your TH-cam channel and subbed. I have been learning how to make a game in Unity but just started doing some UE5 tutorials and I'm already loving UE5 so much. I came here because I just needed to started understanding how UE5 is managing to do things that I just can't do it Unity. Thank you! :)
Loving your content! Learned so much from you.
Great video! Loved your unbiased and fair discussion of the cons as well as the pros. Here before 1m subs!
It is amazing that every subject I need for my professional work I can find on your channel. You give proper examples with comments that just hit the spot.
Information that I can use and interpretate in my own work. The depht of you research is awesome and not found very much around here on other tutorials.
Now lets get back into the engine, because you always motivate me to!
it's great but for example when i activate it on trees, i just see the grey mesh without the skins, why is that?
@@Paul-xu6gt nanite does not support opacity and or translucent shaders. Its sad, I know ;)
It is something to look forward to.
I also tried working around this, but not yet found a way to use alphas etc.
@@thijsw1983 ok, thx a lot, so for now it is completely unusable for trees?
@@Paul-xu6gt for now yes, or you go on an adventure and model all leaves. So no alpha, no translucency. But that is going to be a poly killer. I hope it will work in future releases, or we find a way to make it work. If so, i let you know.
@@thijsw1983 how do you activate alpha and translucency btw? (im new to ue), and what do you mean by poly killer? thx for your answers
The video quality here is amazing. Image is crazy sharp! Great face lighting
Great vid, very clear explanation of stuff that was once over my head, thanks
Thanks for giving us a compressed version of the 2 hours stream)
Thank you for this video. Good clean explanation without the whole ramble around many other youtubers do.
With overdraw, my understanding from the panel was it happens when you have a lot of stacked geometry where the surfaces are almost coplanar, so whatever occlusion testing they're doing is not accurate enough to know what to cull. That's why the ground planes are having more trouble than the rock faces which are usually more widely spaced. This is why I was advocating for some kind of landscape displacement to replace tessellation, so the ground can still be a landmass with some of the nice 3D Quixel materials applied, with Nanite meshes placed on top.
Yeah it is unfortunate that Landscape isn't supported by Lumen or Nanite at this time. Purely using nanite meshes isn't a great way to create large landscapes/panoramas. But hopefully that will change in the final release!
Great video, incredibly clear and concise. For most Unreal users, this is much better than watching an hour long deep dive into info that doesn't really matter to us.
Thanks!
This is great content, thanks for making this vid.
Also my reaction when seeing nanite inner workings : 3:59
Fantastic video and summary, thanks a lot!
Very informative and educational! Thanks.
Thank you! Did help me a lot to get the essence of UE5 basic concepts.
Another awesome video. The main feature that I want is transparent objects. Buildings with windows are not possible unless you remove the window material or the window geometry. I had to do this for several buildings but the difference in rendering was so much better even if all the windows are gone!
Thank you! Yeah you'll have to have windows as separate geometry for the time being. Not ideal but hopefully they fix this soon!
I'm waiting for this for like 2 weeks! thanks a lot!
Cheers!
Hey all, It would seem like I misheard, along with there being a typo in the Epic Livestream on Nanite @ 1:11:38. The powerpoint slide clearly says 6.14gb, but you can hear him say 16gb of nanite data on disk (Compressed). Still, not a crazy amount of data considering the size of the project.
th-cam.com/video/TMorJX3Nj6U/w-d-xo.html
You video really helped me understand how to judge a Nanite-friendly mesh, thanks for the sharing as usual!
Thanks Maria! I'm glad it could help!
wow, very clear explanation. thank you very much for this great information.
I love these UE5 videos. William explains it all so well + is ultra knowledgable with all the tech side of this complex software too! I was wondering if a scene could be half nanite for the rocky assets and half non nanite for the foliage/trees ? Or better still if Epic designed a system for each ie nanite rocks + nanite foliage to solve the culling issue
Your nanite lecture is realy understandable and a brief on nanite will help unreal. I don't have any other question on nanite
super awesome in depth explanation. great show!
Thank you so much!
Great video and a good concentration of info from that live stream :) I just wonder about, what is the best mesh design for both Nanite AND Lumen. As far, as i understand, Nanite prefers (big) meshes, that are not stacked upon each other. Lumen on the other hand does not like complex forms, and going by what they said in the live stream, it´s probably best, if every wall segment is it´s own mesh.
So a Deathstar like surface, where a ton of Greebles are spread across a large flat surface might work well for both, if all those Greebles are just simple shapes and arranged side by side. A Borg Cube with all it´s fine pipes and small clusters, that are arranged in endless layers through the whole Cube might be a not so good idea, especially, if those smaller clusters are all complex meshes (since Lumen prefers simple shapes).
Edit: Hah, someone already made a Deathstar from a ton of free available Greebles ^.^ th-cam.com/video/kRU7VugZCLs/w-d-xo.html
Thank you sr. Its a simple process but one that I was wondering about.
Excellent explanation, thank you so much
Wonderful video thank you so much
Thanks for distilling down to this helpful nugget 🙏
Cheers!
especially the summary at the end
What an interesting video, thanks a lot man!!
Great start for my day, thanks.
Cheers!
With 5.1 nanite supports foliage and its awesome. Good to see how hard they work on the engine
Thanks a lot for all the information you are giving to us ,since unreal engine 4 and now at 5 ., best regards
Good clear explanation and video. Cheers! :-)
Thanks for watching!
So Nanite compresses very well the meshs and the texture starts to become the problem. But fortunetely, in UE4.27 we started to get the Oodle Texture compression!!! :) What a great time to be alive.
Compressing a mesh just means it can be loaded quicker from disk. It doesn't benefit the rendering because it has to be uncompressed before rendering anyway.
Irrelevant-- UE4 doesn't have Nanites and UE5 doesn't have Oodle compression. Neither can benefit from the either's improvements.
@@dIancaster well, what I mean is that since 4.27 implemented oodle, obviously it will be ported to 5.0 too, not the oposite.
@@youtubi123youtubipel Oh, yeah, fingers crossed.
Great video, Thanks!
good explanation, thx!
That music at 00:18 got me thinking i'm watching That Chapter videos with Mike. Oh now i must go binge once this video finishes haha
Seeing this technology finally made me jump from Unity to Unreal. Oh my god I love it. Just wish I'd done it sooner.
Started out with unity but unreal is so much more user friendly
@@wannabefoleyartist9635 Seriously? User friendly? I live and die for Unreal, but I've never heard it called user friendly.
@@dIancaster i can’t program for shit. But blueprint god i love that stuff
@@wannabefoleyartist9635 Oh, yeah, I love that. Way better than Unity's Bolt.
Your channel is pure quality information bro!
Thanks, Jennifer! I appreciate it!
I still don't know what nanite is
This video was really good every other video only lists the pros and not the cons and u listed both :3
Thanks so much!
thank you for the explanation
Great explaination, thank you.
Thanks!
Great explainer. Thanks!!!
Cheers!
Thanks for a great video! Very nicely explained :) For me, the thing that blows me away is that the entire system uses one draw call! I recall hearing that there is a 4ms base cost to use nanite, and I wonder how that'll impact its potential for VR and high-fps games.
Yeah that's a good point! I'm sure Epic is going to improve that performance overall however.
it's great but for example when i activate it on trees, i just see the grey mesh without the skins, why is that?
i love you William the videos are so easy to understand
Thanks so much!
Thank you man !
Nice descriptions. As someone who did numerical computation, I am curious about the math in the culling. As someone who also did imaging of those computational results, the nanite results are very exciting. I feel both conflicted and enthusiastic as I want to know more detail, though I am no longer doing this work.
I learned many highly important bonkers details about nanite. This was very informative.
A really easy way to use it is just decimate your mesh in Zbrush(with preserved UV's) and import it in UE5.
Real easy way to make a good looking scene, easy to iterate.
Definitely, this stuff is the future
Sorry what is the point of decimating? Sounds like it wouldn't make much of a difference with nanite
@@ecs-p3196 It will definitely make a difference in file size. At some point you don't need 20 million triangles for a model that occupies 1% of the screenspace. Decimating makes it easier to UV, texture, and reduces the space it takes up on disk, even if Nanite compresses data very well.
it's great but for example when i activate it on trees, i just see the grey mesh without the skins, why is that?
@@Paul-xu6gt As far as I know Nanite isn't suitable for foliage...yet.
This is sick. Thanks man!
Cheers! Thanks for watching!
perfect tieming my man, just about to start my first scene in ue5
Good luck!
u guys know any UE5 discord?
😂 . I hate when people tell me “good luck”. Do something awesome dude. UE5! Come on🦾
Thanks a lot!
You are quickly becoming one of my favourite people who are doing videos on unreal engine
Ah geez thanks so much! -
great thanks william for the great work.
Thank you!
My faborite UE youtuber. Thank you for the info.
Thank you! I'm honored :)
Im interested to see what workflows build up around Nanite, Hearing these restrictions makes it sound like an interesting technical challenge to use to its best (my idea of fun :D)
Kindof yes, but kindof makes me worried about foliage since look how it is almost nonexistent in all recent Unreal-hype videos hmmm, it's all about those Mars-like beautiful rock formations. Hmmm, still hyped though.
@@Amuntsen Quixel has nanite foliage you can also import, I tried it myself with some bushes. No issue
@@irecordwithaphone1856 You just won't be able to make it move like natural foliage if you want to enable nanite on those. They'll have to be static, if I'm right, which is a shame. He also forgot to mention that nanite does not support vertex paint (all tho it supports vertex color), which is giving me headaches right now D:
One that occurs to me, is the possibility of having hybrid meshes. Imagine doing something, like having a tree. Where the roots and trunk are done with nanite, and then you have the branches and leaves done traditionally. SO you can animate them and have alpha channels on the leaves.
Maybe objects being nanite, until they need to be animated. For example, you could have an object that will have simulated physics, so perhaps it will be nanite, until it moves. And once it stops moving it turns to nanite again.
I think there will be a lot of hybrid workflows and meshes.
New week thanks again I'm here whit you.
Thanks for the support!
Man thanks so much for these things🤗....I need a deconstruction scene tutorial please😊
th-cam.com/video/TABymp8AzMY/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=Quixel Like this one 👉👈😅😅
Thank you for this very informative video, personally I also have problems with the subsurface scatering which creates kinds of mosaics on the texture with NANITE.
great video, thank you
Thanks!
A little correction here.. nanite meshes doesn't take that little drive space for us developers because uasset files still need to store the original mesh plus metadata etc. but it does compress the meshes in packaged version of the game so that's good news for gamer's hard drives.. not so much for developers xD they still take a ton of Gb in editor.
Not according to Epic, no. As mentioned, the Nanite uassets take up about 6gb on disk. I'm trying to verify this locally, but it's a bit tricky to use the SizeMap feature because it includes all references. But even with the SizeMap feature, all the nanite geo + everything they reference is just 16gb for the whole project, in editor, for us devs, which is nuts.
@@WilliamFaucher No idea where you got that 6Gb figure.. I opened valley of the ancient demo and the Megascans folder has 29Gb worth of static meshes and 7Gb worth of textures for instance..?
@@takisk.7698 It’s taken from epics own livestream, bear in mind 6gb is the compressed nanite data :)
So much information I'm looking forward to getting a tutorial of beginner to intermedia for UE5. In my case, I'm in the middle of intermedia and beginner...I struggle a lot with lighting, rendering, and materials...I saw your live session on UE5 environment but still it would be great if you can make a complete tutorial on to UE5.
Thanks for sharing great info. I have a question can we still use megascans meshes with displacement without turning them into nanite mesh?
Great video as aways.
Thank you!
Thanks a lot for this video :)
Is there a simple way to enable nanite on muliple objects or with datasmith ?
Thank You
good for your explaination about nanite, i tried nanite on ue5 and confusing what is it can use for, now your video help me clear all this confused,so ya, thanks a lot always.
loving the tutorials
Thank you!
Thank you!
man i like how you explain thgins keep it going
Thank you very much!
@@WilliamFaucher Hey, I am trying to creat a game and it will be a super nice if you explain a lot of things in unreal engine 5. I know few things like creating main menu like a widget and few things like landscape but it will be so helpful if you explain more about how to make the 3d assest from bridge quixel for example HUGE CANYON SANDSTONE MESA like I tried to importe it to UE5 landscape and try to hop on it but instead I went through it can you explain how to make it real like solid
@@Urek-Treadway-xD-77 Hey man, that goes beyond the scope of this channel. I make tutorials on UE, more specifically creating cinematics, and rendering. There are many other channels focused on making games, though!
@@WilliamFaucher Oh ok well thanks but if you can specifically name a channel that really help me in what i need that will be great if you name it because i been trying to solve it or look for it on youtube google and not find a solution. But anyway thank you for replying you are quick when you and that a good thing.
great video thank you! should we use nanite with megascans though? i enabled it as a test and when viewing in nanite visualization mode (triangles) they didn't seem to shift in size.
Great primer. Thanks :)
For animation/cinematics though I am wondering whether you will get visible geometry 'popping' like you do with the LOD system so as you move farther towards/away from geo that the texture updates will be noticeable? If so, it would be a deal breaker for some scenes.
It's so gradual that you shouldn't be able to tell. The UE5 demo (the big giant thing) uses nanite for the armor parts, couldn't tell any visible popping at all :)
Better explanation than from Epic Games itself!
This is one of the shortest nanite tutorials but by far the best... Same for your other tutorials... You should try out cloning yourself so you can make more tutorials
good explanation of nanite.
you are an angle dude. God sent🙌.
Thank you!
subbed. Thank you.
Welcome to the community!
always stoked to see a new WF drop!
Youre too kind!
Hello! Great tutorial but it leads me to a question: Why should We stack so much geo in such layered way? When You showed us how it looks like, I couldn't actually imagine this could add some details since it's clearly not visible on the surface (since it's buried). Or does it actually work in some other way than I understood?
Cheers!
Great videos! Did you ever think about making discord focused particularly on vfx/cgi stuff? It would be cool to get better source of tips, ideas and to stay in touch ofc. 😀
I'm working on it, yes!
To go a bit more into the file size of the Nanite Valley demo.
It's a 100 gb project, but 24 gb when it's packaged as a game. The project files contain things like uncompressed versions of textures and your source models. UE4/5 of course doesn't include that extra data when packaging a game, but it's really nice to have in a project in case you need to export out a model, or increase the resolution of a Nanite mesh or whatever. Otherwise it would be a much more destructive workflow.
Yeah I can't really speak for the packaged size of things, only editor stuff. Crazy how compression works eh?
Hi William, I saw your video on Nanite and was wondering if you have an understanding of something call mesh shading / mesh shaders ? it was introduced by Nvidia in 2018. There is a video called why you should use mesh detailing the application of mesh shading. nanite seems to fall into two of the 5 suggested application
This content is fantastic. Thanks, man. Greetings from your neighbor in Germany! 🇩🇪🎉🇳🇴
Thanks so much! I adored my time in Germany! Enjoy!
@@WilliamFaucher That's great to hear. Have a wonderful week, man!
Thank you Will. Do you know how to use Foliage and trees with leafs opacity in runtime and using Nanite and Lumen?
Yeah, the overdraw is a concern but still handles it better than without Nanite lol. The reason why it cant cull sometimes is because the cluster bounding box is partially visible. This happens with clusters together at tight angles or far distances because there is more chance of the bounding boxes being visible.
After watching this video the Unreal 5.1 update is even more impressive to me. They made foliage work with nanite. That's incredible
Thank you for another great video!
So, Nanite would be helpful with interiors when importing high detailed furniture (for example Evermotion ArchModels)? Usually that is where my PC struggles.
Q: Is there an option when importing with DataSmith to UE5 to convert to Nanite or does SM has to be converted after import? Since it doesn't work with foliage I presume that it will not work with moving curtains (cloth simulation), or am I wrong?
I have never used Datasmith so I can't comment on that, but yeah as long as your models aren't very thin like grass or hair, I'd turn on Nanite. :) Check the pinned commment on this video, there is a way too convert multiple assets at once to nanite, easily.
And no it will not work with moving curtains as nanite does not work on deforming meshes.
@@WilliamFaucher Thanks again! : )
Thanks for the informative and detailed breakdown! Maybe a noob question, but how do I turn off the 'nanitestats list' command if I don't want to see the stats anymore?
hi pls explain kitbashing in detail and reuse those kitbash to design a new world level. because i have 4.6 mi polygon single industrial rack to be scattered as ton of racks organized as multiple clusters of the Racks.
such good content, thanks so much!
btw, could you, if you find time, make a tutorial on how to grow such an awesome beard? :D
Hi Williams, thanks for your videos. Do you know what is wrong if I set each mesh to the nanite option but when I go into Nanite Display no triangle is shown on the mesh?
Will this be usable in VR? Specifically on the quest 2?