Tendr: a real-time, volumetric, soft-body physics plug-in for UE4

[anonymous_user_718f7017]

We are a team of developers, with a background in medical simulation, that have been working on Tendr: a real-time, volumetric, soft-body physics engine and are currently re-developing Tendr as a plugin for UE4. As physics in games are primarily based on rigid bodies, we are interested in how your creative minds of community would use the soft-body capabilities of our engine to create something new, unique, and fun.

We’re currently working hard on getting our first plugin release done, which we will test with a select group of people, after which we’ll be opening up to the public. In the mean time, we’ll be using thread to post updates on our progress. We’re always looking for ideas and concepts for soft-body physics games or showcases, so if you have a cool idea, don’t hesitate to post it in thread!

You can also follow us on Twitter or check out for the latest updates!

Update 08-25-2015:

Sorry for the late response, but we have good news. One of them is that the project is not dead We had a bunch of alpha testers that we would like to thank for their input, and now we have decided that a public beta would be in order!

Go to our website to download a beta version of our plugin with the frog model included You cannot generate other models with it but we would appreciate it if you would try it out!

Please do mind the system requirements:

• Newest Unreal Engine (4.8.3) launcher version (not the Github version)
• NVIDIA GTX400 series or newer (compute capability 2.0 and higher)

Update 02-27-2015:

So we ran out to the store to get us some Leap Motion devices yesterday, and put them to the test today to see if we could come up with a nice showcase that demonstrates integration of Leap Motion with our Tendr soft-body plugin. We think it’s getting better and better by the day, check out the result:

Update 02-26-2015:

We have open-sourced our TendrModelTetra plugin, that generates tetrahedral meshes based on static meshes. It contains a fork of TetGen, with some additional improvements like texture-coordinate preservation of input meshes.
All the mesh generation code is found in the plugin, but the plugin does not generate meshes by itself, as some glue code is required for giving it a static mesh and reserving space for the tetrahedral mesh (our Tendr plugin does as well).
Still, we believe that people can find a use for it, just like we have.

Update 02-25-2015:

As we’re nearing the alpha plugin release, we’ve been extending our soft-body physics algorithm with constraint based calculations. basically means that we can create more useful models in terms of collision response. Here’s a very quick and straightforward demonstration of pushing and grabbing with the new algorithm:

Update 02-04-2015:

Good news , we are ready for our closed alpha-testing! We are looking for people that want to use soft bodies in their projects and are willing to test our plugin and give feedback.
You will receive a login for our tracker, where you will be able to report bugs, give feedback, and find how to install and use Tendr on our wiki. The system requirements are:

• One or two NVIDIA graphics cards with compute capability 2.0 and higher. basically means the GTX 400 series and up (Epic recommends a GTX470 and up).
• Unreal Engine 4.6.1.
• Windows 7 64-bit and up.

Our engine is implemented in CUDA so only NVIDIA graphics cards for now. We will be porting it to OpenCL so that can run it (although you will still need a pretty good graphics card).

If you want to part of it then send us an email: info AT tendrdynamics com

[catalejo]

Nice! I will be following thread!

[anonymous_user_8943aceb]

Cool! Do you have a video? Can’t wait to see in motion

[Dig_Squid]

Oh very cool, look forward to checking out! I’d love to see more interesting types of simulation in UE4. Did you run into any problems we can help with on the engine side?

[Xodroc]

sounds interesting. Every time I think of “volumetric” soft body physics, something like Weta Digital’s “Tissue” system comes to mind. Simulating muscle and fatty tissue over bone, and skin sliding over all of that, etc. So that would be my first question, can layer soft body materials, including layering them over rigid bodies.

Then I’d want to pull off slicing of those volumetric characters for wounds(and worse).

Probably too much to hope for in a game

[Spectronaut]

Neat.
video always blew my mind.?v=KppTmsNFneg
Beyond destruction I could see using soft body stuff for . Squishy things need to be squishy, yo… that’s kind of a target that game-tech hasn’t fully accomplished.

[Drexciya]

@Xodroc;58336

sounds interesting. Every time I think of “volumetric” soft body physics, something like Weta Digital’s “Tissue” system comes to mind. Simulating muscle and fatty tissue over bone, and skin sliding over all of that, etc. So that would be my first question, can layer soft body materials, including layering them over rigid bodies.

Then I’d want to pull off slicing of those volumetric characters for wounds(and worse).

Probably too much to hope for in a game

You could try spawning instanced soft tissue wound components on the actor, localized by bones. Spawn soft parts of body as they register hit events. Give the new soft parts some ragdoll and attach them at the joints for some funny I assume

[ihavenick (Ata Çetin)]

Can we apply soft body to characters ?

[AlwysAnrchy]

Can’t wait to give plugin a test in UE4!

[anonymous_user_34c62151]

Hi, very intresting!!
A few days i try to find any usful information about soft body physics implementation in UE4, but found only article in UE3 documentation:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/PhysX...Reference.html
What approach do you use?

[CharlestonS]

I could think of some great uses for such as cushions, tires and skin for cinematics.

My question is whether or not the volumetric soft body is affected by another volumetric softbody or if it is only affected by a collision mesh?

[anonymous_user_718f7017]

We are glad to see that our announcement has sparked a discussion about the application of soft-body physics in games, and we want to thank all of you for your input so far. We are continuously looking for new ideas and concepts to push games to the next level by using soft bodies.

Our soft-body physics engine is parallel and GPU accelerated. It differs from, e.g., Weta Digital’s Tissue in that Tissue aims at realism at the cost of performance, whereas Tendr achieves real-time performance by using a mass-spring based model. model also allows individual springs and masses to be configured, and we are aiming for support for various types of collisions with game objects.

Nearly all of our time is currently spent implementing and getting the technology working in UE4, and is progressing smoothly thanks to good documentation and structuring of the Unreal Engine. We are definitely aiming for a video showing the capabilities once we reach milestone.

[ihavenick (Ata Çetin)]

When we can see any beta-alpha video ?

[anonymous_user_718f7017]

While working hard on our Tendr plugin, we want to show you video upon request. It is just a tech demo of some of the capabilities of our real-time volumetric soft-body physics engine. We are really looking forward seeing within a UE4 game, and we would appreciate it if you could give us some of your thoughts about how you would like to use the Tendr plugin. Also, please share with us what we should be showing in our next tech demo.

[Jambax]

Very Nice! You obviously have a very elastic/stretchy surface there. Does your plug-in also simulate things like fluid surface tension etc? E.g. a water baloon or something?

[anonymous_user_8943aceb]

Nice! How did you control those instruments? Are you using a or something like that?

[Antidamage (Addie)]

Stop hurting that poor Rubik’s Cube.

Nah jokes, that looks excellent. How’s the performance?

[DrLuke]

I think one way to use would be for a level that plays inside a living creature, so you could model the floor as being soft when you walk over it, or things to jiggle when you throw objects at them.
While I wouldn’t use the soft physics as the collision mesh, it certainly would make for a very neat effect when the floor dents in a little bit under your weight.

[CharlestonS]

Yeah, it would be cool to remake the level from Zelda where he went inside that fish… haha Walking around on his squishy tongue

@DrLuke;69556

I think one way to use would be for a level that plays inside a living creature, so you could model the floor as being soft when you walk over it, or things to jiggle when you throw objects at them.
While I wouldn’t use the soft physics as the collision mesh, it certainly would make for a very neat effect when the floor dents in a little bit under your weight.

[anonymous_user_e805727e]

Good job, really looking forward to test your awesome plugin. I hope you make your plugin general, meaning not stuck to a sepcific version of the UE4 and needs an update and reworking each time UE4 release an update even the 0.0.1 update like Allegorithmic Substance plugin.