Good thread.
The reason Nanite, or Control's hard surfaces / ray tracing, is important is NOT that it looks pretty. That's mostly an accident.
What it does is lets AAA make stuff that looks about the same, but without baking tons of intermediate assets / making environments incredibly static.
Players discuss this most often when it comes to rendering?
Like - the point of Nanite/Lumen IS NOT gigashit graphics for players. It's to smooth over a million iteration-blocking workflow issues... at a known runtime performance cost.
That same tech can be queered by indies to pull off variously hilarious, huge or fancy things.
Mostly we don't use it the same way- a lot of their stuff doesn't make sense to touch unless you have a solid 10-20+ heads even then!
But some? Hoo boy we can pull off incredible things now.
May 7, 2025 01:07Like my 6000 dudes running around in my game?
That's Nanite + instanced static meshes (with really good Material exposure and batch updating) + Vertex Animation Textures + Chaos async traces
That's all stuff that doesn't exist in Unity or Godot- I'm a rat in Epic's walls eating their AAA cheeses
(tho you could mostly/kind-of achieve this in Godot, but it would take you... I don't know, a year? probably? to replicate what Unreal just hands you, which isn't time we have, and even that likely wouldn't be as performant cus Nanite isn't something you're likely to replicate on indie timelines)
