NVIDIA GameWorks Integration

[Mike.Skolones]

when the new VXGI comes?

Still waiting on it here. I appreciate your patience.

[Mike.Skolones]

It crashes even with a GTX Titan if try 256 mapsize.

We'll look into it. We are still filling out our test suite, so it's possible that we missed it in the tests.

[iniside]

For serious character clothing I would choose the clothing pipeline that is native to UE4, which is based on PxCloth (we used to call it 'APEX Clothing'). We are doing some more work on the pipeline and tools now to make the process cleaner and more reliable. The clothing feature offers better control over the cloth material than you would achieve with FleX (animation blending for example), and also runs fast enough on CPU to make console and mobile use practical. FleX cloth would probably work fine for simple cloaks, 'zombie shreds', etc., but it is a GPU-only feature.

If we are on it.
There is this nice tool inside Apex SDK, ClothingToolCHECKED. Any chances to get it compatible with Unreal ? (if it is not already that is), and improve it ?

I mean there are alot of people who simply don't use Maya or Max, and DCC plugins, are just no good for them (me included).
Having dedicated standalone clothing tool, would be very nice.

And what happen to that nice documentation page Artist Guide to APEX Cloth ? It was very useful, and now I can't find anywhere .

[Mike.Skolones]

If we are on it.
There is this nice tool inside Apex SDK, ClothingToolCHECKED. Any chances to get it compatible with Unreal ? (if it is not already that is), and improve it ?

I mean there are alot of people who simply don't use Maya or Max, and DCC plugins, are just no good for them (me included).
Having dedicated standalone clothing tool, would be very nice.

And what happen to that nice documentation page Artist Guide to APEX Cloth ? It was very useful, and now I can't find anywhere .

Duly noted. Our team is making a concerted effort to review and improve the clothing pipeline in UE4 right now. I'll look into the plan for releasing the clothing tool. On the one hand we don't want to have to rely on the clothing tool in UE4: it would be preferable to have as much control as possible built into UE4 proper, because it is troublesome to split functionality across multiple tools, versions, etc. On the other hand, I don't use Max or Maya effectively either, so I appreciate your perspective personally.

[Nudlegaru]

Duly noted. Our team is making a concerted effort to review and improve the clothing pipeline in UE4 right now. I'll look into the plan for releasing the clothing tool. On the one hand we don't want to have to rely on the clothing tool in UE4: it would be preferable to have as much control as possible built into UE4 proper, because it is troublesome to split functionality across multiple tools, versions, etc. On the other hand, I don't use Max or Maya effectively either, so I appreciate your perspective personally.

Flex clothing has the ability to get torn. UE4 clothing piepline doesn't have that. When will you merge all flex clothign features to UE4 pipline to be more flexible? Thanks

[Mike.Skolones]

Flex clothing has the ability to get torn. UE4 clothing piepline doesn't have that. When will you merge all flex clothign features to UE4 pipline to be more flexible? Thanks

We don't have 'FleX clothing features', I'm not sure what you mean here. FleX provides a cloth primitive, and yes, unlike PxCloth, FleX cloth can be torn; however the clothing pipeline built atop PxCloth is more controllable in terms of stretch, bending and folding, animation blending, etc., in ways that become very important when you try to make close-fitting clothing atop a character that executes quick animations. The PxCloth solver was designed specifically to provide that level of control over the material, because the clothing on a main character has to look just right; but in order to meet those requirements, and to meet performance goals for CPU-based execution as well, things like tearing and collision with arbitrary shapes were not feasible with PxCloth, at least not yet. You should be able to apply FleX cloth to a character for simple cases where tearing is desired, but I wouldn't expect it to behave as well as the other implementation for conventional fitted clothing.

[Nudlegaru]

We don't have 'FleX clothing features', I'm not sure what you mean here. FleX provides a cloth primitive, and yes, unlike PxCloth, FleX cloth can be torn; however the clothing pipeline built atop PxCloth is more controllable in terms of stretch, bending and folding, animation blending, etc., in ways that become very important when you try to make close-fitting clothing atop a character that executes quick animations. The PxCloth solver was designed specifically to provide that level of control over the material, because the clothing on a main character has to look just right; but in order to meet those requirements, and to meet performance goals for CPU-based execution as well, things like tearing and collision with arbitrary shapes were not feasible with PxCloth, at least not yet. You should be able to apply FleX cloth to a character for simple cases where tearing is desired, but I wouldn't expect it to behave as well as the other implementation for conventional fitted clothing.

In the flex demo samples, there is a a tab where you tear a piece of clothes. I hoped your flex tech will enable cloth tearing just like you did it for UE3 for games like Mirror's Edge where many clothes and flags could get torn by shooting or walking through them.

[greboide]

Hi Mike can you recompile flexRelease and flexReleaseExt with -fPIC CFLAG, and reupload them to github? btw the demo is working in linux and its pretty cool! Also makefile.common in ROOT is missing perhaps this is expected as it should work with the flex portion of the library which is still closed source?

[2/147] Link libUE4Editor-Engine.so
/usr/bin/ld: /home/glauber/work/LinuxUnreal/UE/Engine/Source/ThirdParty/PhysX/FLEX-0.8.0/lib/linux64/flexReleaseExt_x64.a(flexExt.o): realocação R_X86_64_32 contra `.rodata.str1.1' não pode ser usada quando estiver fazendo um objeto compartilhado; recompilar com -fPIC
/home/glauber/work/LinuxUnreal/UE/Engine/Source/ThirdParty/PhysX/FLEX-0.8.0/lib/linux64/flexReleaseExt_x64.a: error adding symbols: Valor inaceitável
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)

[Mike.Skolones]

Hi Mike can you recompile flexRelease and flexReleaseExt with -fPIC CFLAG, and reupload them to github? btw the demo is working in linux and its pretty cool! Also makefile.common in ROOT is missing perhaps this is expected as it should work with the flex portion of the library which is still closed source?

[2/147] Link libUE4Editor-Engine.so
/usr/bin/ld: /home/glauber/work/LinuxUnreal/UE/Engine/Source/ThirdParty/PhysX/FLEX-0.8.0/lib/linux64/flexReleaseExt_x64.a(flexExt.o): realocação R_X86_64_32 contra `.rodata.str1.1' não pode ser usada quando estiver fazendo um objeto compartilhado; recompilar com -fPIC
/home/glauber/work/LinuxUnreal/UE/Engine/Source/ThirdParty/PhysX/FLEX-0.8.0/lib/linux64/flexReleaseExt_x64.a: error adding symbols: Valor inaceitável
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. I thought they fixed the -fpic flag, but I didn't check it. I'll ask about that.

[Mike.Skolones]

In the flex demo samples, there is a a tab where you tear a piece of clothes. I hoped your flex tech will enable cloth tearing just like you did it for UE3 for games like Mirror's Edge where many clothes and flags could get torn by shooting or walking through them.

Yes, we will implement the tearing feature in UE4 for FleX cloth.

[Zogrim]

Do you think it can be used for character clothing specially that it seems to handle multiple layers and self collision very well (Imagine a character wearing a jacket, robe or a cape), can we maybe get authoring tools to change existing cloth geometry to flex at some point?

An approach "Oh ! Shiny new feature ! Let's replace everything with it !" is counter-productive. As Mike mentioned, PxCloth is specialized solution, oriented on character clothing (in terms of stability, performance and artistic control over the simulation). It also works on multiple-platfroms and is already used in many games. Originally, PxCloth was developed to compete with solutions like CloakWorks Shroud and Havok Cloth, where "fat" 2.8 cloth with features like tearing, inflatables, metal-cloth, full scene collisions, soft-bodies, etc has failed (as I see it, Mike can correct me on that). No need to adapt FLEX for character clothing, better focus on use cases, where FLEX will be more valuable - advanced environmental cloth, softbodies, deformables.
(BTW, PxCloth can handle multi-layered cloth, just check Lords of the Fallen)

So far, I see FLEX more fitting in a concept of "GPU Physics Effects 2.0". GPU execution only, non-gameplay affective, resource intensive. Even if DXCompute version will be finished, I don't think consoles will be able to handle large-scale simulation, and thus it won't be used widely.
However, maybe it would be worthwhile to create a special scaled-down FLEX version, oriented on gameplay physics (maybe with CPU execution) ?. With support for trigger events, contact callbacks, etc. For games like puzzles, physics sandboxes and such.

[Semaphore]

Zogrim,

The reason I said that is because of a first hand experience with the current Apex Cloth implementation in UE4 where we had a fairly complex character wear a robe (simulated) on top of a tall skirt (also simulated). We had many issues with self collision and penetration. Not only that, but even something like a curtain hanging from hinges on the ceilling was having many problems interacting with the player controller and we had to use hacks to get a semi decent result.

We ideally want the player to interact with it through different ways:
1- Walking through it and have it deform/pull away correctly
2- Shooting at it and having holes created through it
3- Throwing an enemy toward it and this can cause the curtain to be ripped completely from the hinges on top
4- Throwing an enemy toward it and this can cause the curtain to be torn into two pieces (As in the top half of the curtain is still hanging on the hinges)

When I saw the flex cloth demos with tearing and multi-layers I got this hope that maybe this is solid enough to sustain all those features. Now if the new PxCloth update Mike spoke of will solve those issues in a better way then that's great. But it will be great to get at least a rough estimate of when it will be available so we can plan accordingly (Our game is for PC/PS4/Xbox One)

[Zogrim]

we had a fairly complex character wear a robe (simulated) on top of a tall skirt (also simulated). We had many issues with self collision and penetration

Curious to see what the asset look like (if possible)

Throwing an enemy toward it and this can cause the curtain to be ripped completely from the hinges on top

This one looks like a work for FLEX, but the interesting question here is - should this curtain affect movement of enemy's ragdoll ? If not, following approach may be possible even with current version of FLEX: a separate scene is created for FLEX objects, while movement of dynamic PhysX shapes (including ragdolls) in PhysX scene is approximated with kinematic bodies in FLEX scene. So the interaction will be only one-way.
However, in this case availability of DXCompute version of FLEX solver for PS4/Xbox is the key factor.

[Mike.Skolones]

@Mike

Hi Mike ...

i solved the pointlight 's softshadows problem !! just combined DFAO & DF shadowing [not DFGI] with the VXGI ...

now , get the realistic soft shadows too ...

Hey, that's great to hear! I'll try that when I get a chance.

[DIFTOW]

@dvd.kg
Ditch the skylight. I tried using a skylight with dynamic lighting and it looks like ****. Skylights only seem to cast shadows when they are static.