An Ultimate Guide to Unreal Engine 5's Nanite

Back in August, at SIGGRAPH 2021, an Engineering Fellow at Epic Games Brian Karis released a 155-pages-long document that explains literally everything there is to explain about  Nanite, Unreal Engine 5's new virtual geometry system which enables the rendering of trillion triangle scenes at real-time framerates. How and why it was created, what it is able to do, what tasks can be accomplished with it, the tool's future, etc. Now, Brian has released a new video in which the information from the document is given in a more convenient way.

This lecture takes a deep dive into how Nanite works, from mesh import all the way to final rendered pixels. The team explains how the mesh-based data structure is built, streamed, decompressed, culled, rasterized, and finally shaded.