Is it possible and straightforward enough to do some surface deformation in UE4 engine, like have it so tracks from a tank leave an indent for example? I’m not wanting to do anything as fancy as Spin Tires but if I could do something where the ground can deform based on proximity to another object?
I’m sure you could do stuff like the tracks inside the materials instead of the actual ground geometry, but as for deforming the ground geometry, I’m not sure yet.
I’d say check out the vehicle example and see how they did tracks, get that working. It might be enough/what you want, if you need to indent the ground, then its hard b/c the mesh resolution will not be that high to make the look of a dent with mesh offsets.
In Project Spark you can do this via raycasting and facilitating editor terrain functions, not sure if this is possible with U4.
If you just want tracks, you can use something like decals, actually deforming the terrain is a problem because many things depend on the geometry to be static.
I’d go with this, as affecting the landscape actor at run time is not possible currently.