Reporting in to give you an update. We are working on exact mesh generation for our soft body actors, and it’s coming along nicely!
Here is an example with the chair model:
And is what is looks on the inside:
You can also check out our twitter page where we will post minor status updates and additional screenshots of our progress.
@n00854180t: It’s nice when you have colleagues that decide to use tetrahedrons just moments after I posted here that we do not use them anymore 
Very nice, can’t wait to see available to the public. We may be able to make use of in a project we’re currently developing.
And another update. time, we are demonstrating interaction between our soft-body actor and Unreal collision shapes (cube and sphere). The difference between and the rolling ball demo is that we used our own collision actor for the ball, and here we use the sphere collision shape as selected in the static mesh editor. Capsule collision shape support will follow shortly. These interactions also give a force back that can be used in Blueprint (not shown here, but it can be seen in the rolling ball demo), so you can easily implement any kind of interaction you want.
@CharlestonS: Nice! Mind sharing what you want to use it for or how you want to use it? The more use cases we have, the better we can make the plugin.
The use i see us having for would be to enhance cinematics/cut-scenes.
Being able to have chair cushions that react when a character sits in them, being able to have skin react to interaction during a close ups, etc.
We may also be able to utilize it for one of our characters which has a squishy body during gameplay.
Will plugin a simulation ‘Kill’ distance/LOD which will allows it to only be simulated within a preset proximity to the view? That would make it much more plausible for gameplay use.
We are currently in the process of setting up facilities for closed alpha testing, and when it’s done you’ll be able to sign up. Testers will receive the plugin and access to an tracker system where you’ll be able to leave feedback so that we can improve our plugin. We’ll let you know when everything is ready and when you can sign up, which will be soon!
@CharlestonS: Cinematics is indeed another good application of soft-body physics. Right now our physics engine runs all the time, but we will make the necessary changes to make it configurable under which conditions to run the physics engine.
Cool. I would love to try for the wheels of my car.
@Tendr Dynamics - Very cool, so with the plugin does it require building the project with the source being compiled or can it just be installed like say the Substance plugin to an existing project?
Meat cube! Meat cube! Meat cube! I want it for realistic organs 
Just for clarification, we are looking for game developers/designers that have a specific goal in mind. Although Tendr is meant for usage, specific scenarios give us insight in what the capabilities/limits of our plugins are. insight will be very useful for improving our plugin.
It will be interesting to see the results!
It will be a standalone plugin that you just copy to your project folder and it should work.
Tendr and Organs and Arms: looks like a match made in heaven
Can the elasticity be reduced enough to make it into a liquid, which is affected by gravity? I’m picturing something like a lava gun that oozes down slopes/around other objects once it’s shot.
would it be able to simulate metal?
im guessing its based on internal springs, what if the springs only ever moved when an external force acted on them, without re-extending themselves afterward.
would something like that be possible?
It would be nice to have a ‘no pop-back’ simulation where you could dent a surface like metal without it popping back out like skin or rubber would.
Wouldn’t it be better to use PhysX fluids for that? I do not know if UE4 exposes that part of PhysX. We have SPH fluid simulation but that was for another project and is not part of Tendr. Maybe if there is enough interest, we could look into creating a plugin for that.
That is called plastic deformation, and it is one of our goals, but I cannot say if it will be in the initial release. We will keep you updated.
By the way, we have a new website up and running, which is an additional source of updates aside from discussion thread and Twitter.
The PhysX fluid simulations even back in Unreal 3 days was not game-ready in a realistic sense. It was goofy and gelatinous and just plain wrong looking. Currently there just isn’t a great solution for characters interacting with water in Unreal 4. You can toss up particles if you want, but the water itself will not deform in an interesting or pleasant way and you certainly won’t end up having the normal map do you any favors in real time either.
Tendr stuff looks very promising for a lot of deformable surfaces honestly. Here’s a quick list of things I’d use it for in game development:
Interactive waters/liquids (or if you have a separate tech ready for , anything is better than what currently exists)
Destructible props, particularly resource-collection props like “mining” a rock that dents inward as you mine it or a tree that dents inward as you chop it down. APEX destructibles are neat…but they require the breaking points to be setup in a pre-determined manner. With your system it could be dynamic deformation with a particle mesh emitter covering the “resource chunks” flying off.
Deformable walkable surfaces. There’s several games that have tried to do vehicle “mudding” experiences with sort of thing in mind, but there’s clearly more options than that for gameplay. A grenade could blow a dent in the ground then that could be used as a hidey-hole etc.
Obviously physical character melee combat would benefit greatly from , but it could even extend to unrealistic and stylized spaces with a big impact. For instance - how fun would it be to play a cartoony Sumo game with big fat guys that let you smoosh their bellies around?
If you do add any sort of water interaction plug in let us know!!! I have a river that needs interaction!
I’m With , I want to use it on tires for car
Here is a Christmas gift from us to you, a new video that shows one method to implement tires By changing the spring stiffness, you can make the tire very rigid to very soft so you can adapt it to how you want within Blueprint.
I see. Since our focus is on porting our soft-body physics engine to UE4, we didn’t look at the fluid simulation capabilities of UE4, so we have no experience with it.
That would have to a separate plugin as it is not related to our soft-body physics engine.
At first glance, sounds more like something better suited for a rigid-body physics engine. However, if you set the spring forces very high, you should get very rigid objects. Also, when we implement plastic deformation, becomes more feasible.
Well, we have closed alpha testing coming up soon, so anyone that wants to make a sumo game is more than welcome!
Unfortunately, fluid simulation is not on our priority list. Working on Tendr is consuming all of our resources so right now we don’t have time to work on a fluids plugin, but who knows what the future will bring? At least, we will add it to our list of future plugins that we could/should implement.
Great work!
Can be used for muscle simulation on a skinned character? I would imagine squash and stretch behavior would be achieved through plugin if it works on skeletal meshes.
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:
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
@Semaphore: yes, that should work just fine. Right now you can do by attaching soft actors to already skinned characters. However, we are working on soft components specifically for skinned characters, which makes it easier to use.
We’ll just leave video here:
By the way, we will also be at the Dutch Unreal Engine Mixer evening in Amsterdam, so be there if you want to chat with us.
Just a little update here (we’ve been posting more stuff on Twitter lately).
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:
Of course is just a quick 'n dirty basic example.
We also had a nice chat today with Epic’s , showcasing a little bit of live editor action with the Tendr plugin. Gave us some nice tech demo suggestions too, e.g. with the Leap Motion plugin that was just released
Will keep you guys posted for more!
And here is another update. 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.
