First off, not sure this is the right section. That said, I really want feedback from you content creation types.
I’ve spent the last 6 weeks or so building a new Destructible Mesh Editor. I’ve coordinated with Ori Cohen and some of the guys at Epic, as well as Bryan Galdrikian at nVidia. They’ve been really helpful.
Precis: New DM editor, with all of the functionality for the Apex SDK. UE4 style, and almost all working at this point.
And the Youtube demo:
EDIT: That screenshot reminds me that I forgot to mention in the video that the cutplanes aren’t visually how I’d like yet. I plan to attach a decal to them to project the texture as well as make the cutplanes themselves translucent panes.
As I said in the video, I really want content creator feedback. USER feedback. I went into my bunker and built this, now it needs to get the final bugs fixed and out the door. Before that, I’d like to make sure it’s as usable as possible.
For coder types, I will be writing a bunch of articles about various techniques I learned building this.
This is going to be biggest contribution to UE4 that i can think of. It will be interesting to see how Epic handles it.
Looks awesome and it will be very impressive when it’s finished, congrats! Correct me if I’m wrong; so, when we shoot a destructible mesh and it explodes, can we shoot also the fractures and they get into smaller fructures with this? This can’t be done in current system right?
Ya, you can fracture the mesh up to 5 levels. Once it gets that low (or sooner, with the proper settings), it can become “debris” - which is a weird thing I don’t fully understand. It’s my understanding that it’s visual only.
The multi level fracturing can be done currently, but the assets have to be authored in Physx Lab. The ones you can make in UE4 currently don’t support anything but a single Voronoi operation on chunk 0.
Wow. I hope you’ll get the help you need and make this a reality for all of us. Thank you for your efforts. I wish we see this on the marketplace very soon!
But my goal isn’t to see this as a marketplace plugin. I am submitting this for integration into the engine, as it’s a drop in replacement for the current editor.
There’s been quite a delay. I didn’t want to hand it off to Epic until the final fracture mode was in, and that turned out to be quite an ordeal. Bryan Galdrikian at nVidia helped a lot, finally just stepping in and fixing the last bit of broken-ness, and now it works as well as it can.
I’ve fixed a few of the bugs in my previous demo, and streamlined a bit, but there’s still outstanding issues that will have to be addressed with nVidia’s help. Now that the editor is in the form of a pull request, I hope they will extend a helping hand.
's a new demo, just the Cutout mode, only 2:45 and hopefully no mic clicks.
Brilliant work mate & hopefully we can see this Pull Request make it into 4.8 though to be more realistic I’d say 4.9+ is more likely due to 4.8 already being branched a couple of days ago
So as far as I can tell from the video it’s basically physx lab integrated into the engine? (is there some functionality missing?)
That’s pretty handy I have to say! I always wondered why the current UE4 fracture editor is limited
There’s a few missing features. Cutout mode has a mode where you can specify a custom cut direction - that’s not in. There’s also a tiling mode in cutout that’s not in. The tiling mode isn’t in because it simply doesn’t work in the current Apex. Once it starts working again, I’ll add support for it in the editor.
Considering you plan to directly contribute it, i think you should work a little on UI stylizing to fit rest of the UE4 tools. The red “Mesh outdated” text kind of feels out of place aspecially in the tab and view buttons on bottom should be implemented to viewport buttons on upper right (if thats possible?). I’m also not sure about that slider and buttons in upper left tab.
Hi Backov !
I’d like to work on destructible meshes too, and now I’m trying to figure out how things works. I think that your code could be tremendously useful to understand how destructibles work in the engine and also a good example on how to extend and customize the UE4 editor.
Is your code accessible ?
