I’m relatively experienced with CAD and some programming, but new to Unreal Engine. We are experimenting with an internal demo/trainer, so performance is not a bottleneck like it might be for a distributed game. The goal is for a vehicle to interact with ground material (push, scoop, drive on, etc.) in a contained scene, ideally in a standard physics/realistic manner (e.g. shovel removes material and leaves a hole, shovel can then dump that material). From the searching I have done, these appear to be the possibilities in UE:
a) standard landscape/ground is not easily or automatically deformable
b) others have faked it by changing textures and depth maps (e.g. footprints, tire tracks, snow)
c) particles do not interact with each other, so there could not just be a big pile of them (for example)
d) 4.23 introduces the Chaos destruction engine - could this work to break a ground-type object into tiny interactive pieces?
e) spawn thousands of small objects (rocks, dirt clumps, etc.) - would these interact correctly with a shovel?
(b) is not ideal, if (a) and (c) are true, that won’t work. (e) may have performance issues, but it will be on dedicated hardware. Any thoughts on these or something else?