Understanding Nanite - Unreal Engine 5's new virtualized geometry system
June 4, 2021
With the release of Unreal Engine 5 Early Access, we’re setting aside time over the coming months for a series of in-depth presentations on our weekly livestream, Inside Unreal.
We kicked this series off last week just after UE5 Early Access was announced as Epic's Nick Whiting (Technical Director), Nick Penwarden (VP, Engineering), Michal Valient (Lead Rendering Programmer), and Simon Tourangeau (Engineering Director, Tools) joined Senior Technical Product Designer Chance Ivey and Community Manager Victor Brodin for a first look at all things UE5 Early Access.
We kicked this series off last week just after UE5 Early Access was announced as Epic's Nick Whiting (Technical Director), Nick Penwarden (VP, Engineering), Michal Valient (Lead Rendering Programmer), and Simon Tourangeau (Engineering Director, Tools) joined Senior Technical Product Designer Chance Ivey and Community Manager Victor Brodin for a first look at all things UE5 Early Access.
Most recently, Epic's Brian Karis (Engineering Fellow, Graphics) and Galen Davis (Evangelist, Quixel) joined Chance and Victor for an in-depth discussion on Nanite, our new virtualized geometry system. You can learn more about the inspiration behind Nanite here, but essentially, Nanite uses a new internal mesh format and rendering technology to render pixel scale detail and high object counts. In this week's in-depth livestream, the team took a look underneath the hood to explore how Nanite was used in the sample project Valley of the Ancient.
In case you missed them, we invite you to check out both of the livestreams mentioned above for a deeper understanding of Unreal Engine 5 Early Access. We also invite you to join us on our Twitch or YouTube channels for future episodes in this livestream series as we cover additional key features including Lumen, World Partition, MetaSounds, and more.
Here's the full UE5 Early Access livestream schedule:
05/27 - Welcome To Unreal Engine 5 Early Access
06/03 - Nanite
06/10 - Lumen
06/17 - New World Building Features
06/24 - Motion Warping and Full-Body IK
07/01 - SUMMER BREAK
07/08 - SUMMER BREAK
07/15 - MegaAssemblies
07/22 - Metasounds and Quartz
07/29 - Game Feature Plugins
Get Unreal Engine 5 Early Access
If you’re an existing Unreal Engine user, you can get UE5 Early Access and the Valley of the Ancient sample project from the Epic Games Launcher. If you’re new to Unreal Engine, we suggest getting to know UE 4.26 as a first step.