So - Currently the current Unreal Engine destruction system is not very in-depth and could use improvement.
Objects just fracture in addition this can cause a fair bit of overhead on the CPU since the Destruction system is not running on the GPU.
Anyway here are my suggestions for Improving the destruction system inside Unreal Engine.
Meshes should have multiple user defined damage states opposed to just fracturing outright.
Meshes should have “Damage Textures” for each state. These textures should be an Alpha overlay or something similar.
Finally we have a fracture state. This should be a model swap with the previous state.
Make Destruction run on the GPU.
The Ability to define Alembic files for the fracture state would be nice. Especially for large destruction scenes.
For In engine fracturing I would encourage looking at Nvidia’s PhysX Lab and how it goes about setting up stuff for fracturing.
I would encourage Unreal Engine devs to watch the following videos to get an Idea of what I am saying. These videos are from a Unity Asset called DestroyIt and Nvidia’s PhysX Lab
Video 1: This can be done in Blueprints by simply having the actors simulate physics on hit. This doesn’t even need to specifically be a Destructible Mesh actor.
Video 2: This can be controlled in the Physical Material by using the Destructible Damage Threshold Scale.
Video 3: Not sure if you want the full integration of PhysX Labs in UE4, but I don’t think that will happen, at least not in the near future. PhysX Labs can be downloaded from Nvidia’s website and is free to use.
1. Meshes should have multiple user defined damage states opposed to just fracturing outright.
You can control the amount of damage received and how it reacts by adjusting some of the settings in the DM, such as accumulate damage, damage cap, Damage Cap, support depth, etc.
2. Meshes should have “Damage Textures” for each state. These textures should be an Alpha overlay or something similar.
For something like this it would be better to apply a decal when the weapon hits. This shouldn’t necessarily be handled in the destrcutible. As an example, when a weapon hits it may hit in different places, but if it’s just a texture it will apply to the same location every time as it’s damaged. Doing this through the weapon makes sure that if you hit on a corner or different spot on the front the damage for the decal is in the hit location.
3. Finally we have a fracture state. This should be a model swap with the previous state.
Not sure what you mean since this already happens. Depth 0 is the base mesh, depth 1 is the destruction level that is swapped out. If you’re authoring your DMs with PhysX Labs you can have additional depths of destruction that are swapped out when hit.
5. The Ability to define Alembic files for the fracture state would be nice. Especially for large destruction scenes.
not sure on this one.
6. For In engine fracturing I would encourage looking at Nvidia’s PhysX Lab and how it goes about setting up stuff for fracturing.
This may or may not happen in the future, but currently there aren’t any plans that I’m aware of that there will be a more defined integration of PhysX Labs full functionality into UE4. Someone tried a while back to do this and submitted a pull request, but it still needed some work and had a tendency to crash. It also didn’t support previously authored DMs from PhysX Labs or ones previously created in UE4 without crashing. It was created with 4.6 or 4.7.
Destructible Tutorials: I have some tutorials on my personal site that cover some basic DM setups for things like Damage Spread, Impact Resistance, World Support, Importing Custom FBX Chunks, etc.
Destructible Settings Overview: This is project similar in fashion to content examples layout that does an overview of 99% of the settings. There are a couple that are missing or have stands that aren’t finalized, but overall this should be a good demonstration of settings and help you get the results you’re looking for.
