Nanite for Artists

Nanite for Artists | GDC 2024

Рет қаралды 90,489

Күн бұрын

Much has changed with Nanite since it was first released in Early Access. During that time, artists have been exploring what is possible with technology. In this session, we will demonstrate the best way to build with Nanite, explore the tough edge cases, and create assets that work well across all platforms.

Пікірлер: 166

@kazioo2 Ай бұрын

Epic: "With Nanite you don't need to think about LODs anymore!" Also Epic: "Nanite is a lot of data, so you should rely on instancing. Also instancing is limited, so here is how you can bring back LODs to swap out Nanite with billboards."

@Sluggernaut Ай бұрын

I want to argue with you but this is pretty fair. Really its "With nanite you dont need LODs any more! Well, as long as youre not trying to create a dynamic forest or something. Bunch of rocks? Hell yeah. All day." Then, they looked at that forest limitation and came up with a solution for that and stuff like it. Still cool and really gets us past trees that are just a bunch of cards. Again, you're not wrong though!

@korinogaro Ай бұрын

@@Sluggernaut Well you can argue with that because they were saying it when nanite was not supporting, among many, foliage.

@pavelksen3166 Ай бұрын

And don't forget about the shadows! Nanite is very slow with cascading shadow maps. Therefore, you need to use Virtual Shadow Maps. Virtual Shadow Maps are slow on regular geometry! Let's convert everything to Nanite! Wow, you have a lot of vertex animation that causes the Virtual Shadow Map to update. We will have to limit the maximum distance at which vertex animations occur. Oh, you have variable time of day and night, so the Virtual Shadow Map is updated every frame! And so on and so forth.

@caden6305 Ай бұрын

Instances are limited to 16 million. Most developers will never even reach half of that limit.

@Bruno-cb5gk Ай бұрын

@@pavelksen3166 this is definitely the bigger issue

@LoganPinney Ай бұрын

Arran is one of the best tech artists instructors out there! Excellent talk 🎉 thanks for the concise presentation

@BradDaemons Ай бұрын

He really is the goat. So knowledgeable on so many topics.

@egretfx Ай бұрын

the guy who screamed when you turn on the overdraws at 01:44 made my day!❤😂, thank you for this video! we are learning a lot!

@JiggyWatt Ай бұрын

That's Arran, the presenter. Absolute GOAT!

@egretfx Ай бұрын

@@JiggyWatt GOAT!!!!

@PolygonAcademy Ай бұрын

awesome, very clear and concise breakdown and super smart way of working. thanks for sharing this workflow/technique!

@byunjoy1320 Ай бұрын

I also thought about using pcg to create foliage assets (for billboards tho) when I was messing with tutorial.Fully dynamic workflows is the best tool for these natural environment.Great job!

@dyelon13 2 күн бұрын

Gee, thanks EPIC. I would love to implement this super hacky workflow with the promise that you guys will figure it out properly in the future

@juezna Ай бұрын

So basically the talk was about bringing back LODs into our workflow... nice. To be fair, it's still pretty amazing how you implemented nanite and the new tessellation feature is really nice too. If you asked me, it would be nice that you made the process of creating procedural content more artist friendly, the same way you did with CONTROL RIG. I know people kind of laughed when at the talk they mentioned new gizmos as an exciting feature. It was laughable. BUT, focusing on making things user/artist friendly is something that many software companies many times overlook, and should not be underestimated. If you force users to have to figure out how to use your software instead of enabling them to intuitively explore it and experiment with it, you are loosing users by the second. I would love to see more commitment with PCG. For example, creating a neat UI with placeholders for the tree components. Easier material/terrain workflow. Etc

@KintaroTakanori Ай бұрын

surprisingly awesome presenter / speaker. well done

@patrikbaboumian Ай бұрын

Thanks for this!

@sierrafoxtrot1331 Ай бұрын

Insightful! Great work. Hoping we can get this in a content sample so we can review it in editor with some examples. Regardless, thanks for the knowledge!

@prometheus_beard Ай бұрын

Can't watch it now, but thanks for your time Arran! Looking forward to this.

@oskarwallin8715 Ай бұрын

would love to see a method on baking ground cover color info into landscape textures / rvts. making it possible to remove ground cover completly at distance. (for example if we have an area with bushes clustered around, we cant change the ground texture to match the bush colors, due to up close the ground still needs to be ground texture. sure we can fade it in using textures and masks over the same areas we place this cover, but landscape materials only got 16 sampler slots, and it starts going a bit crazy when using shared sampler slots that needs to tile 1:1 over several landscapes. Sadly enough we're working with landscapes so large and so forested that we're hitting the cluster cap really early.

@carbonium1264 Ай бұрын

ME : you were ment to destroy LODs and billboards not join them ! Nanite : ha ha billboards and LODs go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

@IndyStry Ай бұрын

The talk started with overdraw problem shown with the default approach. Would have been nice to see to see overdraw at the very end to see how much better it got with the method they showed

@Charlotte-ef9th Ай бұрын

The key thing was in your acknowledgment about how Nanite works and how to work better with it. So, we don't really need this. Besides, what do you especially want to get from the new picture? Like, even if you compare them, it's useless data because anyway, problem of optimisation is way more complex.

@sephtv2759 20 күн бұрын

The whole pcg, instancing part, didn't do anything for rendering performance, he's still drawing many overlapped geometries. What it did achieve was simply reducing the amount of on disk data needed to represent the tree by instancing the same lower poly branch over and over as opposed to individual ones made in a DDC. The only part that helped with the rendering performance was switching to billboards in the distance.

@katsiarynaharelik4466 Ай бұрын

Great stuff, got a question about HLODs. Does Pcg has the same hlod as level? Im recreated the tree pcg with look ats, but cant get them fallback to LODs through HLODs disable nanite

@PeterKLee255 Ай бұрын

This is amazing talk. I'm wondering how I can handle world position offset on the tree leaf in PCG, like wind sway or something. As far as I know, I can't paint vertex color or change UV on PCG.

@TriChaser Ай бұрын

Really love the presentation. I was wondering whether epic can release the project file from the presentations so that it can be studied by the community?

@tehf00n Ай бұрын

I added megascans to PCG Biome and it did not like it at all at anywhere over low scalability. I was 100% sure I was doing something wrong. This video helps me start to understand why I can't just "nanite everything" and go.

@pipesfranco 18 күн бұрын

I want my vertex painting back...EPIC!

@NicoleSummer8 27 күн бұрын

Awesome!👍💪

@UnrealDojo Ай бұрын

Let’s go

@colorsreflections Ай бұрын

muito legal a palestra

@Copa20777 Ай бұрын

Love the presenter and the presentation

@thevoid6756 Ай бұрын

awesome talk

@BirbicusButticus Ай бұрын

Regarding the latter half of the talk, making forests out of subsections. Would the method shown then be incompatible with the procedural foliage volume feature? Because at a glance based on this video: that handles procedural placement much better, taking into account individual tree heights, collisions with each other, randomising the rotations, min/max ground normals, inc/excluding from landscape/transluscents/staticmeshes/landscape layers; and some other fun settings-- and it's just in the engine ready to use and doesn't require the end user to then create several 100+ node trees.

@Fafhrd42 Ай бұрын

You could probably use the 'Actor Foliage' foliage type with the base tree PCG Actor with the Procedural Foliage Volume for placement. Though that may result in the trunks not being part of an instanced mesh (with Nanite and auto-instancing I'm not sure how much of a performance hit that really brings. Could be negligible.)

@shannenmr Ай бұрын

The other potentially large performance issue with Foliage is WPO causing VSM invalidation, you can work around this by limiting WPO over certain distances in the mesh/foliage tool settings or you can use the new Shadow Invalidation setting on the Mesh to stop the meshes shadow being affected by WPO / making its shadow static even if its moving.

@nathanfranck5822 Ай бұрын

If the shadow of a moving tree is static, wouldn't that mess up self-shadowing on the tree?

@SinanWP Ай бұрын

nice

@pacificlinedesign19 Ай бұрын

amazing.... really enjoy these type of talks

@klausbdl Ай бұрын

for the terrain material he showed at 11 minutes-ish, why not use depth to reduce the tesselation the further is it from the camera?

@JoshPurple Ай бұрын

Exceptional 🏆🏆🏆! Thank you 😁!

@l_t_m_f Ай бұрын

Brilliant fusion of PCG with traditional workflows. I'm blown away.

@user-ev4ud5xs2j Ай бұрын

UE5.4.1 The bug issue with the motion graphics function remains unresolved, the same as before; Especially when generating SVG models and opening them after saving, if the axis center point automatically deviates, the use of the animator function above is also prone to failure. When the animator switches to Sequence control, the effect is unstable or ineffective. Material designers cannot save multiple effects, and custom colors for material design become invalid after switching text parameters to semi transparent----Recently, text bugs have been discovered, text animation strokes, the preview window is normal, and the MRQ rendering output has no strokes. After the preview stroke is saved, it directly returns to the default first material when opened, as well as texture cloning, and the preview and rendering output effects are unstable.

@huhuhuh525 Ай бұрын

ever since i have updated to 5.4, I have not been able to use UE. everytime is "GPU Crashed or D3d Device Removed"

@RayCheng_Super Ай бұрын

Love to see you guys really cared about foliage problem and the effort of trying!

@Jbbriant-Ardaria Ай бұрын

I would love to have seen the overdraw result of the scene once every leaf is a triangle. With relatively low overdraw, I've been able to spawn 30 billions of leaves with a decent frame time (

@micho510900 Ай бұрын

Born to be a speaker

@makkon06 Ай бұрын

insane to me that you can just construct a cheap tree using PCG like that. opened my eyes to the possibilities

@pbrglez Ай бұрын

So what do you do with wide aerial cinematic shots where you have lots of trees in the distance? Billboards are not really a good workaround in this case....

@behrampatel4872 Ай бұрын

Nanite 101 - Start here,everyone

@CGFUN829 Ай бұрын

cen we have the laptop/pc spec ?

@towelkeeper Ай бұрын

This was a cool presentation, but I can't help but cringe at the thought of working with billboards and LOD's in combination with Nanite. That stuff was supposed to go away. It's definitely not a long term solution, in my opinion. Also, while using PCG to construct the tree in-engine is super nifty, it's not an option for people who use software like speedtree to build their trees.

@RustigChill Ай бұрын

don’t worry there will be ue6 but it will need 1 day to open 😂

@spectrecular9721 14 күн бұрын

@@RustigChill**Two days if you're a c++ dev 😂

@leonhaze9852 Ай бұрын

Nanite tasselation has a problem with AMD, besides buying an Nvidia could anyone find any fix on this?

@user-ev4ud5xs2j Ай бұрын

There are many bugs in motion design at present. The animator's effect is unstable and the rendering output cannot work. Text strokes cannot be saved and the rendering output cannot be saved. The material designer's multi-effect overlay cannot be saved. The SVG model generation axis is automatically offset and many effects fail. . . Most bugs are related to material designer animator SVG. . .

@epicgames_simone Ай бұрын

Fantastic talk!! Arran rocks!

@shimlaDnB Ай бұрын

so nanite is great for rocks.... kinda wanted to know that in 2021

@chelo111 Ай бұрын

@-41337 Ай бұрын

people are rightfully clowning on the funny fact that we still need LoDs with nanite. but that being said, damn is nanite still freaking amazing.

@crazyAlexander23 Ай бұрын

Nanite For M1 chips is important

@kyuuketsukikun420 Ай бұрын

It would be nice if nanite could generate the billboards automatically

@cymarin3d511 26 күн бұрын

Is it possible to have the project file for this demonstration?

@ThatTechGuy123 Ай бұрын

That was super cool! Thanks!

@DonC876 Ай бұрын

As a Unity developer it's always very strange to see how much more developed Unreal Engine is on so many levels. I really think Unity should focus much more on mobile hardware and just fix and implement basic functionality . Imho they have lost the battle on the high end rendering front a long time ago 😅

@AuronDzilk Ай бұрын

The future of so many things in our life might come out of unreal engine and I'm here for the ride.

@_Clivey Ай бұрын

You said 2 months ago that you agreed and would fix this "Please update the launcher so we don't have to hunt the updated asset in Unreal. Just add "Updates" to the filter instead of a little orange icon that's impossible to find amongst 100's of assets" .....WHERE IS THIS UPDATE?

@danielmauriciotorogarcia5783 Ай бұрын

Aweome presentation

@georgefromjungle5211 10 күн бұрын

One other problem for realistic trees are shadows. You can have all the leaf detail you want, but if it does not have correct shadows, addtional detail is absolutely poitless. Trees with individually modeled leaves look same as billboard trees - no depth, everything is flat. So if you have individually modeled leaves or needles, they also need to have needle level shadows that average cascaded shadow maps just can't do and all these performance hit is for nothing, no visual benefit.

@TheResilentNerd Ай бұрын

Yay.. some day Ill work with the unreal engine 🥰 for now ps5

@Dhieen Ай бұрын

doing trees inside unreal with pcg? im not sure i will like it

@Riclaval Ай бұрын

What about a forest of rocks? Like a stone quarry for example

@JenAnty_JA Ай бұрын

Awesome tech

@lonewitness Ай бұрын

So leaves are not supposed to be impossibly thin planes, who woulda thunk.

@trebilicious Ай бұрын

Are there plans to have Nanite work on decals? Sci-fi objects using mesh decals/trim sheet floaters need some Nanite love.

@crazyAlexander23 Ай бұрын

also more optimize for Mac's

@p.schattenfell9612 Ай бұрын

Krasse scheiße, I love It!

@OwenPrescott 23 күн бұрын

Can't you just not use nanite for foliage and use it for other things?

@SpatialBiggs Ай бұрын

This was great thank you 🫡

@Cazaq Ай бұрын

Give us a vertex color per instance solution! Our artists don't want to use Nanite because of this.

@DeputyChiefWhip Ай бұрын

Hi... What do you mean by this?

@Ninefingers1986 Ай бұрын

Custom primitive data?

@Cazaq Ай бұрын

@@Ninefingers1986 Can't store enough information. Some sort of sparse volume to project/interpolate vertex color from is required.

@n1lknarf Ай бұрын

Nanite meshes have issues with nav mesh; the nav mesh doesn't recognize there's a mesh in space to remove the nav mesh from the mesh space.

@aarorissanen930 29 күн бұрын

Imagine saying to a late-90's game dev that one day a game engine will model something as mundane as trees to each individual needle or leaf. They'd laugh in your face.

@over8124 Ай бұрын

someone should tell them about normal maps

@JoJo-ue9vg Ай бұрын

For movies normal maps are not good enough.

@lkyuvsad Ай бұрын

I can’t believe he’s still using such weird maps. Total amateur.

@user-qv2wd2jc6m Ай бұрын

As incredible as the tech is and I've been like a kid in a candy store excited ever since I saw the unveiling of UE5 back in April of 2020, it's kinda messed up how since the initial launch demo dropped Epic has been touting "it just works, it just works" yet now they are saying the opposite...???

@adrienhoffmann6752 Ай бұрын

Cool, but the tutorial isn't feasible. He utilized a custom blueprint named "pcgbp look at." While there's a blueprint named "look at" in the electric dream environment, it lacks the "look at position" parameter, making it a different (custom) PCG blueprint. I stopped there; I understand it's stressful, but at least highlight the crucial nodes to create a comprehensible tutorial or provide the project.

@JulienFournierJulinoleum Ай бұрын

You can take the blueprint out of the ElectricDream demo, remove the 2D look at branching and replace the Look At Target by a vector property on your PCG Actor. The LookAt used on the tree is bascially just a center point from which the branch and leaf point from.

@adrienhoffmann6752 Ай бұрын

@@JulienFournierJulinoleum Can you tell me more, please? I removed the two '2D look at' branching, but what do I set to the 'set members in PCGPoint'? I found the 'get vector property' in the Event Graph of my actor, but how can I incorporate it into my PCG graph? Thank you for answering.

@imlostgaming9542 Ай бұрын

@@adrienhoffmann6752did you ever figure it out? I’m trying this method too

@adrienhoffmann6752 12 күн бұрын

@@imlostgaming9542 No, I tried some workarounds with poor results, sadly. Can someone clarify the steps to create the custom "pcgbp look at" please

@ThreatInteractive Ай бұрын

Even in the best case scenario for Nanite, it will still be slower than real optimizing. There is proof on the unreal forums criticizing the lack of context on the documentation. Nanite will only "improve performance" if you have abused overdraw, it's not even about poly count as you can see in 6 million poly test on that thread. Keep quad overdraw(in optimization views) under a VERY light sprinkle of green, no green is better. And material shaders under dark green. Keep to this and you'll be performing way better than using Nanite. The overdraw point where you get "better performance" with Nanite is where your meshes have so much detail it looks like noise after a couple of meters from distancing yourself from it, which can only be fixed with TAA which will blur detail everything in basic motion or TSR which is 10x more expensive and still blurs thin objects foliage or basic camera motion. Not only that, thet overdraw point of "returns" requires VSMs which can cost a ton on 9thgen power. So then the overhead cost of Nanite vs LODs ends up being Overhead of Nanite+All the other crap that's needed(4x slower) vs just using LODs. Foliage has tons of overdraw, but guess what. Nanite explodes when WPO is on making it several times slower even with the WPO distance limiter. Horrible systems by Epic Games. We need better LOD algorithms, transition effects, deferred texturing, and precomputed instancable meshlets.

@redtroll80 Ай бұрын

I see only like 5-10% framerate drop on packaged project, with like ~100 trees WPO on/off w/native 4k on 4080. On ancient laptop with 1060 WPO nanite is much slower but I guess this tech is not for 8 years old graphics cards

@Shunkan26 Ай бұрын

Hello TheKj what's up ?

@ThreatInteractive Ай бұрын

@@redtroll80 "I see only like 5-10% framerate drop on packaged project, with like ~100 trees WPO on/off w/native 4k on 4080", On mass consumer hardware (9thgen consoles, and $300 GPUs), the performance loss percentages' are much higher as anomalistic GPU cards like 3080+ shrink these percentages. This is why we develop on high ends cards like your, but only conduct performance test and target performance on $300 GPUs. We also stated in another comment the additional(expensive) requirements nanite also needs to remain "stable" or "worth it". We are releasing a massive video soon about UE5 problems.

@ThreatInteractive Ай бұрын

@@Shunkan26 This studio is owned by that person you mentioned, we consist of few people but our founder would like to respond: Not performance 🙃

@YOOOOOOOOOOOOO-dv2nt Ай бұрын

@@ThreatInteractive ...So no nanite on the Quest 2 then? I'm kidding of course, but seriously. VR is one of the places that tech like Nanite will (most likely) be necessary to push fidelity forward. But right now? Doesn't seem viable from the tests I've performed in UE. I work with Unity and I'm waiting for the release of a Nanite-like 3rd part plugin called Nanotech, but I suspect I will run into many of the same issues with that plugin that are seen in Unreal Engine's implementation.

@PrefoX Ай бұрын

so nanite is not fast/good enough so we go back to billboards partly. that is kinda way more work again and the illusion is breaking again as before. so maybe software nanite is not enough and you gonna use the already exisiting "hardware nanite" which every dx12 ultimate compatible GPU has. mesh shaders can do the same stuff

@cburn-YT Ай бұрын

You do realize the point of showing foliage in this short talk was to highlight the ONE issue nanite mainly has right, idk about you but I can't think of many games or scenes that are just pure foliage, vehicles, interiors, miscellaneous items buildings, ect. Not to mention you can use Nanite with Niagara mesh particles and the likes, if you still think nanite is "more work" overall you are delusional

@dealloc Ай бұрын

@@cburn-YT On top of my head; GTA, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Firewatch, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Hunter Call of the Wild. Most of these are static in nature and highly optimized for their purposes. Though, the work that went into that is tremendous considering some of the engines that they used that were even older at that point. Yes almost every game in the past 10 or so years have some or more sections that involve a ton of foliage, interiors, etc. This is why it's brought up and why they are actively trying to solve those pain points in Nanite. It's not based on a hunch. It's also why this talk even exists. It's not based on "what if", but rather on the real feedback they've gotten from artists.

@MaleOreo Ай бұрын

Not only is this an excellent tutorial but I also learned Unreal Devs use Blender mega based.

@kaizu4914 Ай бұрын

complex and confusing with a lot information, is there any documentation about how to model an asset best fit for nanite and performance overall?

@sephtv2759 20 күн бұрын

I'm pretty sure he summarized it quite well. Nanite performs best with continous, smoothed faces, fewer UVs and fewer UV island splits and as few as possible layered nanite objects on top of each other. Think big cliff rocks. The more you deviate from those optimal conditions the worse off it will perform. A forest being the worst case scenario. Especially coniferous trees. Oh and masked materials layered on top of other masked materials will destroy performance, so you're better off modelling your forest assets with real geometry or as close to as possible to the real shape without going overboard with geo count and using the opaque surface rendering mode.

@kaizu4914 19 күн бұрын

@@sephtv2759 Thank you for explaining. I think I will stick with PBR method, and leaving the rest for technical artist do their magic. So one thing I notice is manifold geometry are better? So no decals or floating geometry at all? (I use floating mesh attach to others mesh for saving poly count)

@nil0bject Ай бұрын

"which we know is bad". you guys don't know jack

@RH3D Ай бұрын

im depressed

@hq2136 Ай бұрын

Нічого не зрозуміло але дуже цікаво :D

@DeltaZavr. Ай бұрын

Включи субтитры и авто-перевод.

@hq2136 Ай бұрын

@@DeltaZavr. я знаю англійську))

@IM2awsme Ай бұрын

😂 youtube can't even handle rendering those trees in a video, nanite is incredible.

@simayecemucar Ай бұрын

🤌🏻

@demonhogo Ай бұрын

another reminder that my macbook is not good enough for me

@user-zc3wp1ri7w Ай бұрын

EpicGames：Could you guys allow us to merge Houdini in unreal ? SideFX:Nope EpicGames:No problem, we will start making ours ones.

@NathanRitchie Ай бұрын

I know, right? Having a houdini lite/geo-nodes baked in is insane. Plus the new motion tools. 0.0

@haiao2995 Ай бұрын

1st

@The9PointStar Ай бұрын

nop

@ismaillinkin7896 Ай бұрын

fixe steam session

@Mittzys Ай бұрын

elaborate please

@ismaillinkin7896 Ай бұрын

@@Mittzys it not working at all but in 4.26 it work

@ickebins6948 Ай бұрын

Discriminating trees.... NOT COOL!

@Raptor_i81 Ай бұрын

@madfingergames, we need this tech in Gray Zone Warfare.

@gn2727 10 күн бұрын

All this talk about Nanite and no game is actually using it. Gaming industry is in a sad state now. Instead make a single game that actually uses this.