Adding Displacement
Setting up & using displacement on the Studio licences of PANORA|make
Last updated
Setting up & using displacement on the Studio licences of PANORA|make
Last updated
PANORA|make's paid licenses supports landscape displacement, using Nanite (5.4+) or legacy Virtual Heightfield Meshes. Both methods are compared below:
Minimum UE Version
5.4
5.1
Performance Cost
Big
Recommended only for cinematics or 30fps targets.
Moderate
Depending on the level of resolution of the VT
Texture quality
Same
It's the same material ; no difference.
Moderate
Depending on the level of resolution of the Color VT.
Virtual Texturing required
No
Yes
Collision and Shadows
Yes
No
Displacement depth
Free
The displacement can go upwards, downwards, or both; and follow the landscape normals.
Upwards only
The displacement only goes upwards from the landscape; regardless of normals.
Keep in mind that both are highly experimental and have issues.
VHMs are legacy and probably won't be updated further, don't really feature collisions or shadowing, and can have runtime bugs when packaged with blocky artefacts.
Nanite Displacement is very performance heavy - adding 4ms of GPU render time on a mobile 3070 GPU and has issues with AMD GPUs as of UE 5.4. Having to manually add config lines in the .ini files of the project shows how experimental the feature is!
The features and setup required are listed on the tabs below depending on your choice.
In the Project Settings, ensure that Nanite is enabled...
...and enable Nanite on the Landscape. Make sure to rebuild Data after enabling it.
Then, go in your project's DefaultEngine.ini. Look for a section called "[/Script/Engine.RendererSettings]" and add these two lines under it:
r.Nanite.AllowTessellation=1
r.Nanite.Tessellation=1
Then restart your project. You should now have access to the Nanite Tessellation features in the Global Options.
Enabling it will allow the Displacement maps to be used with Nanite. If it is disabled, they will only affect Virtual Heightfield Meshes.
will also exclude it from being rendered in the VHM.
After the initial setup, you just have to enable the Displacement space in
You need to have set virtual textures on the terrain with the volumes. See for more information.