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

I smell a new version of surgeon simulator in UE4’s future ^.^ Seriously, looks awesome and I can think of some fun uses for .

Any update on ? Very excited.

Soft body physics is always cool.

I wonder when soft body physics and destructible meshes will become more ubiquitous in games. Should be interesting.

Great, now I cannot stop imagining a game where you just go around blowing up Gummy Bears

I want to use on a character’s face while they get punched in slow motion.

Or better yet imagine something like a hypothetical Mortal Kombat 11 using soft body destruction on flesh and fracture meshes on bones.

I was thinking people sitting in sofas, armchairs beds etc, and not appearing to be interacting with furniture made of stone. Keep up the good work!

I’m now looking forward to someone making Surgeon Simulator II, where the soft body collisions to make it even harder (well, softer…) and more gory.

Finally. I can create a real …

Our Tendr plugin is up and running! Now optimizing for performance and additional functionality, which includes tooling for you…
To encourage your creative processes, find enclosed two initial tech demos: soft-body pulling & soft-body bouncing.

Your ideas about using the plugin are helping us a lot in developing the right things right. Thanks!

https://vimeo.com/107930583

Finally some videos and it looks great! Would work well with a vehicle damage system or tyres?

+1 on the vehicle damage system

looks really promising, nice too see some new updates! :slight_smile:

I’d love to see a way to use on characters, so that you could “slice into” them dynamically.

looks awesome, I would love to use it in a damage system with APEX physics. I hope it is still being actively developed and that a version of the plugin is released soon. is the one thing that UE4 is lacking.

Sorry for the late response guys, a good soft-body physics engine doesn’t implement itself!

@, and others: technically, anything you can simulate with masses and springs can be done with our plugin.

@n00854180t: Right now, only entire meshes can be turned into soft objects. We are in the process of implementing a way to select a part of a mesh/character to turn into a soft object. It is essential in creating a plugin that is easy to use and at the same time versatile enough to be used for pretty much anything you would want to.

@OnfireNFS: The lack of posts and updates is because we are very busy with development :wink: How do you see the combination of APEX (now PhysX) and our plugin? Since PhysX is built into the Unreal engine, we are implementing our plugin in such a way that it can interact with PhsyX objects as you could see in the video of the rolling ball demo. But is there anything specific that you have in mind?

Again, any ideas and suggestions are welcome because they will contribute to a better plugin.

Awesome, thanks for the response.

For a way to implement it that would complement UE4, you might consider making it so your code could handle the APEX cloth asset file data, so that users could simply author the content in the same way it’s done for APEX cloth, using NVIDIA’s plugins for Maya/Max. I imagine you’d need a similar data set in any case (e.g., which verts are soft-body weighted). Of course that wouldn’t handle voxelization (I assume you guys are using tetrahedrons?), but I’m guessing you already have an in-engine voxelization routine for that.

The engine of course already knows how to read in the APEX cloth files, so that shouldn’t be a huge problem. Just a suggestion, dunno how feasible that is.

Is there any i would be able to make elastic skin for a simulator using plugin? :slight_smile:

@n00854180t: That is certainly an option, but we would prefer to do the voxelization process directly in the Unreal editor and we are looking at all the options that would allow us to do so. When we can select a volume which we want to voxelize, then we’re all set. Btw, tetrahedrons are so last century so we do not use them :wink:

@{}: Sure you can! Remember that we have a medical simulation background, so one of the many intended uses is simulating skin and tissue among whatever you can think of that is soft.

Awesome! :smiley:

That would be great - thing is that it support adding voxelized areas to characters. Dunno how feasible that is early on though, but it would be a killer IMO.

Hah, nice.