Hi! Does anyone know a better way of doing deforming tires? Or any idea of how to improve this method?
Hiya
Was watching your stream the other night, interesting stuff.
When you were using Flex, you couldn’t get the tyre constrained to the wheel ,
How about using collision to constrain the tyre ?
The tyre as you had it then 2 SM as each half of the rim holding the tyre in place (SM then constrained to car body)
Off the wall idea, how about cable component ? as the tyre carcass…
Cables do seem to deform a little when they collide
You can def attach a cable component to a SM
Or as a smoke and mirrors exercise, have the SM modelled with a squished bottom and fixed , then rotate the texture as it moves ( pan the tread also)
401Sly
If you are not planning on using actual soft-body physics then this effect can be done in vertex shader with a bit of math. Aka find contact points, send them to material, in material pull vertices away from contact point to the center of the wheel hub and push some of them aside. Vertex colors can be used as masking for this - so that only flat side stretches to the side and not contact surface itself.
Otherwise if you really want to keep your setup with a lot of bones - make a small cylinder as a collision boundary for maximum tire deformation and find position of the bones using ray-trace or sphere trace.
I will look at the cable componnent and see what I can use it for. as for attaching the flex actor to a mesh, I tried but failed. The resulting joint was verry easy to break.
oh and modeling a squish tire and panning texture is nowhere near acceptable to me x) I want the tires to act as a second tire and add some drag to the vehicle if they get flat (Blowup)
Other than flex. wich is very buggy and unstable, is there any way to have soft-body physic?
This definitely should be something that’s simply faked. The scrolling texture could work, have morph targets for the tire when it’s off the ground, on the ground, and flattened. There must be a way to use some sort of deformation cage or box that would work even if the tires are rotating, the animation or blueprint subforms might have better suggestions.
I believe Epic once mentioned on their live stream about how they handle the tire deformation for their Mclaren demo.
You could try this:
or code your own solution
yeah… 80 USD. I mean it might be worth it. or not. The question was asked as wich benefit this had over flex and why it was worth 80 USD, still no answer to this day. I would not mind at all to pay it if it really solve the issues I have with flex and allow me to make more realistic car simulations for my tutorials series on youtube.
I think I will do some research on vertex shader. 
Hi guys,
Do you have some news about tips or tutorials to acheive accurate tire deformation at zero speed and while driving ? I am looking for a UE4 in-editor feature (no runtime solution) that let the user deforming a mesh (by instance a tyre being deflated) , and this deformation could be controlled in the sequencer. I already investigated some animation process from Alembic files or legacy vertex animation features but they are too limited since the large number of frames that I have to manage. The level of complexity is raising as the whished deformation must stay at the bottom level of the tyre (contact with the ground) whatever the rotation of the wheel. I tried to manage with a texture projected with WS coordinates but it 's not easy to setup and the final result is not very accurate.
Thanks by advance.
Hlx
Maybe you can achieve it with something like this:
pre-baked solutions will work only on flat surface.