Yes but not ready to share anything yet

Thanks Sean!

Includes this great video showing how the Nanite Foliage seamlessly LODs. No popping. No harsh transitions. Good appearance preservation (although this light direction is overly generous).

1 minor detail, it can switch to voxels within the twigs themselves as they get further as well. A Nanite cluster can now be either 128 triangles or 128 voxel bricks. That visualization only showed 5 steps but there are as many as it takes to halve the count until there is 1 root cluster.

I’ve wondered the same. We haven’t yet explored any alternative uses for these new tools yet. It probably can’t beat the best hand modeled hair cards but it seems like it could be great as an auto generated LOD for spline based grooms.

Yes. This has been one of the most challenging parts of the problem. If opacity per voxel is too expensive, voxels can either be 100% covered or not, which do I fill? And determine that relatively fast since the Nanite build for a mesh needs to take <1min.

A cluster in Nanite typically is up to 128 triangles. Voxel clusters are 128 4x4x4 bricks. Brick positions are fixed point so no precision problems.

Really though gaps aren’t a key concern for voxels since they are used primarily for subpixel features which result in partial coverage.

Correct. 3 separate features: assemblies, skeletal meshes, and voxels. None of which is strictly foliage. Each can be used without the other. Can make assemblies and keep as meshes, like the repeated elements on this shield from the original UE5 demo. Or voxelize a single Nanite mesh.

Sure. We didn't get time to do the wind animation as an actual physics sim but want to in the future. AC Shadows wind looks amazing and we aren't there yet.

Breaking off branches could be a problem since Nanite assembly HLOD needs to merge things. They aren't individual branches in the distance.

Agreed

5.7 for first version and then probably more significant improvements for 5.8.