Is Unreal engine proper for aircraft aerodynamic (airfoil) design?

Not out of the box would be my take.

‘Physics’ in Unreal is largely hard-body physics: do things grossly bump into one another, like pool-balls or boats on the water. There is also some fracture (Chaos) and the ability to program soft-body stuff, but not natively so far as I am aware.

The water itself could be somewhat modeled but moreso for the visuals and general bouancy, for example: [Community Project] FREE Ocean Water Shader

Gasses, vortices, drag, etc are all particle-centric (naiver-stokes) so to DISPLAY the system, you could use Niagara, like for the water above. But, the behavior is something I feel you might need to program yourself.

So the answer is ‘yes’, but you will have to work to make it so.

Explore Niagara for Unreal, I’m not as-familiar with it’s capabilities as other systems but I know there is some workings into fluid-sims inside the system. Otherwise, since it’s something you could feed data-to from another algorithm you could still use Unreal/Niagara to at least display your model even if you have to build the model itself.

Don’t take just my word for it though, I’d solicit other opinions.

ref:

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