The Detach Translucent operation separates translucent and opaque materials in static meshes into separate components. This separation is essential for ensuring that Nanite, Unreal Engine’s virtualized geometry technology, can be effectively utilized, as Nanite does not support translucent materials. This operation optimizes the scene for Nanite by creating distinct static meshes for opaque and translucent elements.

This operation identifies static meshes containing both opaque and translucent materials. It then splits these meshes into two separate components, ensuring that each material type is handled correctly. This operation allows you to take full advantage of Nanite’s capabilities for the opaque portions while maintaining the visual quality of the translucent parts.

Dependencies

Run Detach Translucent after Smart Merge and before Enable Nanite to ensure that the meshes are properly optimized for Nanite processing.

Best Practices

• Mesh Optimization: Ensure that the scene is free from unnecessary duplicates or merged components before running this operation. This prevents redundant splits and optimizes memory usage.
• Material Consistency: Check that the materials used in the scene are correctly assigned as opaque or translucent to avoid misidentification during the split process.
• Backup: Detach Translucent is a destructive operation that modifies the scene’s static meshes. Make sure to backup your scene or use version control to avoid accidental data loss.

Considerations

• Performance Impact: The splitting process can be resource-intensive, especially for scenes with many complex meshes. Monitor your system’s performance during the operation.
• Material Handling: The operation attempts to preserve material assignments but may fail if materials are misconfigured or missing.

Asset Management

• Uasset: New static meshes are saved under Content/User/Meshes/Split/Opaque/LevelName and Content/User/Meshes/Split/Translucent/LevelNamefor easy access and reference.