Nanite
UE5 virtualized geometry
Definition
Nanite is Unreal Engine 5's virtualized geometry system that streams and renders meshes with effectively unlimited polygon density. Artists can drop multi-million polygon ZBrush sculpts directly into UE5 without manual LOD chains — Nanite handles dynamic decimation and streaming per-frame based on screen size. Nanite changed environment art production by removing the need to bake high-poly detail into normal maps for most static props.
In production
Nanite works on static meshes with no transparency, no vertex animation, and no skeletal deformation — hero characters still use traditional baked-down low-poly pipelines with hand-authored LODs, since Nanite currently can't handle skinned meshes. This changed environment art production by removing the need to bake high-poly detail into normal maps for most static props: a rock or wall segment can be Nanite-enabled straight from a 5-million-triangle ZBrush export with no retopology pass at all. Foliage and masked materials were a notable early limitation since Nanite couldn't efficiently handle per-pixel alpha masking, though UE5.1 and later added support at a performance cost compared to fully opaque Nanite meshes. Virtual Shadow Maps are the companion system almost always enabled alongside Nanite, since traditional shadow maps struggle with the same triangle density Nanite is built to handle.
