Fixing UE5's Foliage Problem

Unreal Engine 5's Nanite virtualized geometry system is great for developers, but requires remaking old masked foliage assets entirely. Many new game developers simply mix masked foliage with Nanite assets, leading to poor performance due to programmable rasterization and Nanite Overdraw. This can be fixed by using high-poly opaque foliage without masking - but that has so far required throwing out all of your current foliage assets and making them entirely from scratch. Here, I show a technique using Blender to convert old masked foliage assets into high-poly meshes using geometry nodes. 00:00 Introduction 00:14 The problem with Nanite Masking and Old Foliage Assets 01:20 Programmable Rasterization 02:00 All your Assets are garbage now 03:07 This is a weird cultural problem 03:55 Procedural Vegetation doesn't fix this 04:30 What we actually need 05:57 Converting Masked to High-Poly using Blender 10:10 Visualizing the new mesh in UE5 10:40 Other optimizations and upcoming video 11:44 UE5 Performance in Hermit Open World RPG 12:05 Goodbye and thanks for all the fish