Liam Wedge is our Lead Technical Artist here at Garden Studios. Known for his curiosity and problem-solving skills, Liam recently dove deep into Nanite Assemblies in Unreal Engine 5.7, a feature with huge potential but almost no official documentation.
It started as a mix of curiosity and wanting to solve a challenge. When I saw the Witcher tech demo for UE5.6, I was really excited about the foliage changes but was then disappointed to learn they were only coming in UE5.7.
Once I realised the main branch on GitHub was already at 5.7, I knew I had to build it and see what I could figure out. I’d also seen people online asking how it was done, so part of it was about helping others who were just as curious as me.
The lack of documentation, hands down. It was all trial and error. Even after I got it working, I realised I’d been doing a lot of extra steps that weren’t actually needed — just because I was trying everything I could think of.
The main win is that it works, which is great to confirm. But there’s still a lot more to explore, like getting the same workflow running with animated skeletal meshes. At one point I even managed to get Unreal to recognise a skeletal mesh via USD, but that’s another rabbit hole for later.
Definitely technical artists, environment artists, and studios who want to get ahead of the game before UE5.7’s full release. It’s for people who are curious, want to push their skills early, and for teams who need to optimise large-scale environments for production.
The big one is skeletal meshes in assemblies. But for now, I just hope the blog helps save someone else from a few late nights of trial and error.
Contact us if you’d like to chat with Liam further about our capabilities to support your content requirements.
