What is Nanite

Nanite is a new and improved virtualized geometry system introduced with Unreal Engine 5. It provides an internal format for imported meshes, creating “Nanite Meshes” as opposed to the previous Static Meshes. New rendering technology allows Nanite to render pixel scale and high poly counts effortlessly. It hasnesses new Level of Detail (LOD) rendering methods that allow for deffering details and polycounts from every perspective.

Benefits of Nanite include

Geometry Complexity, the overall polycounts able to be rendered in real-time,

Photogrammetry assets, the ability to import geometries directly into the engine to allow artists to work more effectively with photogrammetry assets without the concern of multi-million polycounts,

Frame Budget, that are no longer limited by polycounts, draw calls or mesh memory usage,

and Automatic LOD, where level of details are now automatically set up upon importing, thus removing the need for manual individual mesh LOD set-ups.

Check out CGHero’s supercut from UnrealFest for a quick introduction to Nanite!

Want a more in dept introduction to the system? Take a look at this beginner friendly tutorial by Beardgames on YouTube, an account dedicated to helping people with game development by producing Unreal Engine and Blender Tutorials.