Quick answer: Unreal RenderDoc capture of a Nanite scene showing “nothing” in the draw list? Nanite runs compute shaders for visibility and material evaluation — you see those, not traditional draw calls.

Trying to debug Nanite material rendering by clicking traditional ‘Draw’ events; none are there. Nanite handles drawing differently.

Nanite Workflow

Nanite’s visibility buffer is built via compute. The base pass reads the visibility buffer and shades materials. Look in compute events: VisualizeBufferGen, NaniteDepth, etc.

View Mode Diagnostics

In editor, use ViewMode → Nanite → Visualize. Many overlays (Cluster, Triangle, Material complexity) help diagnose Nanite issues without RenderDoc.

Non-Nanite Fallback

Mark a mesh as non-Nanite (turn off Enable Nanite Support) to debug its drawing the traditional way. Useful for comparing.

PIX Captures

For Windows, PIX captures handle Nanite better than RenderDoc historically. Worth keeping in your toolset.

Verifying

You can locate Nanite mesh processing in capture and inspect material shading. Visualize Buffer view modes show meaningful output.

“Nanite is compute-driven. Look at compute passes and visualization view modes.”

Learn the Nanite view modes early — they answer most Nanite debugging questions without leaving the editor.