In case I worded the title of this poorly, more specifically what I am trying to implement is a ground material that is essentially loose trash and detritus that moves (like snow, in “Surface Trails” from the marketplace) when the character walks through it. You know how at garbage dumps all of the trash kinda combines into this gross, somewhat fluid multi-colored material that consists of all sorts of different types of packaging and plastic bags and bottles? I don’t think I am describing it well, so here is a picture of what I mean -
So, I can think of a few different approaches to how to potentially accomplish what I am going for, but I wanted to get some additional opinions on what would be the most practical or effective way to create and implement this. I want there to be a portion of my map with this kind of trash jumble on the ground that is deformed or displaced or moves when the player character does. I have seen this done with much more fluid and uniform materials like snow and mud but I don’t think I have seen it with something that is much less granular and periodically has full objects in it like glass bottles and cans and bags and chunks of wood and bricks and generic trash items like that.
I presume it would require two steps - first, creating a multi-colored dynamic material that mimics the look of loose trash and behaves like perhaps a sand material (along the lines of this), and secondly finding a way to randomly populate assets with physics enabled from a larger collection of single trash items to then place atop the section of the map that is using the initial material so that they both effectively become combined. That seems awfully expensive on hardware, though. What do you think?
I will admit I am not exactly certain I know what you mean with the first part of what you said (throwing simulation enabled trash objects into the trash engine." Are you saying to literally drag and drop assets and throw them in, or do you mean something more specific, like with procedural trash objects?
I am seeing something here that looks like exactly the kind of thing that would be most helpful. Do you mean something like that video?
As for the second part, I guess my concern would be that it would end up looking sludgy or, like, wet or something whereas trash would be grainy and rough. I am trying how to figure out how to replicate not just loose trash objects but that kind of gritty multi-colored type of debris material that gets created when trash is broken down and mixed together. The type of thing that you could grab a gross handful of and that doesn’t actually consist of full objects or items - just bits of detritus. Anyway, I will look into the Cyberpunk example. Thank you very much for your reply.
The engine (as it seems you are on 5) should already create instances for you. So you can clutrer up the scene with objects just fine.
That’s what I’m suggesting.
As far as converting the base terrain to an area that looks like garbage…
Decals. Lots of Decals.
An underlying tiling mesh is also a good idea.
To do that I suggest making separate objects and arranging them in a DCC so you can produce the texture(s).
You could go as far as placing trash on the floor and shooting photo sets, but that gets increasingle complex for what it is worth.
A desaturated mud like base made with quixel Mixer would probably be just as good for a base if you then add layers of Decals and meshes…
