> Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works. Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real time so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets; there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs; and there is no loss in quality.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/a-first-look-at-unre...
I would think a technology that claims the more detail the better and that it will deal with worrying about optimizing what can be handled would work very well with a high quality scanning technology to make very detailed real-world based models.
It has been a pretty widely used optimization technique for a long time, and not specific to Unreal Engine (though I can't find which 3D renderer introduced it first).
Edit: See your sibling comment, which came in just after I originally replied here.