Decided to take a short break from my Hair simulation stuff. ambershee suggested in IRC working on metaballs, so decided to take the work done by NVidia and implement it into UE4. First obstacle was that the Vertex Factories aren’t set up to use a Geometry Shader, so I modified this and allowed Vertex Factories to opt in for a Geometry Shader. Once I figure out the best design, I will submit a PR so that others can use Geometry Shaders with Vertex Factories in the future.
I will be writing some documentation over the weekend on Vertex Factories, Global Shaders, Drawing Policies and such. It will contain a few examples of different shaders.
Awesome you beat me to it, this is exactly what I was working on before (but didn’t get this far) I’m interested on any docs you might produce for this!
I have had a number of requests for the source to the Metaballs, so I am releasing it to everyone today. I was always hesitant due to the engine modifications that are required and how difficult it may be to keep it up to date. So I provide this with no assurance that it will be updated (I have updated it to v4.5 but may not going forward. I will accept pull requests).
This is still very heavy WIP, nowhere near production ready. I have a branch available where I will accept pull requests from anyone making awesome changes/fixes
https://.com//UnrealEngine/tree/MetaBalls-4.5
I have also isolated the changed/added files into a release zip
Updates are coming slowly, and over time I will continue to release what I have.
Can’t really say, I dont know enough about the particle side of things, I suspect in its current form, its not possibly, its bound too much to the local space of its grid.
