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Nanite Geometry

Authoring guidance specific to Nanite-enabled meshes. For pipeline / runtime details see Rendering → Nanite.

Authoring rules

  • Don't pre-LOD. Ship the full-density mesh. Nanite picks LOD per pixel.
  • Triangulate before export. Quads / n-gons are tessellated automatically but unevenly.
  • Avoid masked materials — opaque is significantly cheaper in Nanite's two-pass shading model.
  • Single material when possible. Each material adds an indirect dispatch in the material pass.
  • Avoid heavy WPO on LOD0. Foliage with wind WPO falls out of Nanite below r.Nanite.WPO.Threshold (default 200 cm) and rasterizes traditionally.

Skeletal Nanite

Enabled per-mesh in the Skeletal Mesh Editor → Build Settings → Enable Nanite. Limitations:

  • Cloth simulation falls back to non-Nanite for the cloth sections.
  • Per-section materials still each add cost.
  • LODs are still authored — Nanite kicks in at LOD0 only on most setups.

Foliage

  • Use the Static Mesh Foliage Type with Nanite enabled.
  • Wind via WPO: set Disable Animation on Nanite Below Distance to 10–30 m.

Landscape

r.Nanite.Landscape 1 — experimental in 5.7. Provides per-pixel detail across the landscape mesh without traditional tessellation.

Displacement

Nanite Displacement Maps (UE 5.4+): a height texture that drives true geometric displacement at Nanite quality. Use as an alternative to old tessellation workflows.

Diagnostics

  • NaniteStats — runtime stats
  • Show → Nanite Visualization → Overdraw — find hotspots
  • r.Nanite.Visualize 1 — visualization buffer

Gotchas

  • Lightmap UVs are unused for Nanite + Lumen. Don't pay the cost of authoring them.
  • Two-sided rendering is supported but doubles material pass work.
  • Custom Depth Pass for Nanite meshes is supported but slower than non-Nanite — only enable on a few highlighted actors.