A brief tutorial on creating a Chaos Destruction element, simulating the dynamics, animating the playback in Sequencer in preparation for rendering in Movie Render Queue.
https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/qzpl/unreal-engine-chaos-destruction-for-linear-content
My pleasure. The more thorough Chaos Destruction videos are well worth the deeper dive. Thank you for the feedback as well.
Hi. I didn’t understand how to use Chaos Destruction in Movie Render Queue.
I created a Chaos Cache Manager, recorded Chaos Destruction, placed the manager in a sequence, added Start Time track and set key frames at the start and the end time. It worked exactly as I wanted when I played the sequence in the editor and the object I wanted to destroy began to be broken in pieces at the timing I set the start key frame.
But when I rendered the same sequence in MRQ, the object began to be broken apart at the first frame of the sequence and it had already been destroyed before the start key frame I set. The destruction behaviors were different between the editor and MRQ.
At the end of your tutorial video, you said simulation can be rendered in Movie Render Queue but I didn’t understand how. Could you make another tutorial specifically to render Chaos Destruction in Movie Render Queue? It wasn’t easy for me to understand what was being done in the last part of the video talking about this. Do I need to create some Blueprint?
I’m at the same state as you are, the MRQ doesn’t reflect the cues i set up in the sequencer. Destruction starts first frame and don’t play as set up… did you manage to fix this ? Thanks
The thing to keep in mind is the caching is done at the engine tick rate and not the Sequencer FPS, so take a look at the total number of seconds of the cache in order to gauge the approximate start stops. I’m sure this process will be refined and improve over time as this is a fairly new feature in the engine.
Another thing to keep in mind is that playing back in the Sequencer or in-editor is not the same as playing in game mode. Setting the cache manager to Play instead of record is also important for proper playback. Feel free to post screenshots of your settings or issues here, so we can work on it together.
Hope this helps!
Wow, this is a really awesome and succinct tutorial! Great job explaining the workflow, I think I’ve watched this twenty times now while I practice Thanks very much, Michael!!!
My pleasure. Very happy t ee people getting some value from these tiny demos.
Hey Michael,
Having some issues with frame stepping going on out of MRQ, the simulation in UE playback is perfect and smooth in 24fps sequencer, but when exported from MRQ and imported to AE for playback at same framerate, there is obviously some frame stepping going out of UE that makes it look 12fps instead. You can see me go frame by frame here and the MRQ is not respecting the sim for every other frame for some reason:
Any idea what causes this? I had this issue in another level prior, but even in my test scene with default UE settings its doing this on export with MRQ.
Now you had an excellent tip in your tutorial which helped, which would be clicking on the cache object in the browser to actually get a REAL read out of how long the sim is / how many frames. This one has a time of 13.2129 and frame duration of 429. I assume this is how it needs to be in sequencer which is what I did - set frame 0 at “0” for start time, then scoot down 429 frames and keyframe “13.2129”. I also set the keyframes in sequencer to linear instead of auto-curve easy ease as I assume that messes with interpolation.
I was hoping being exact would fix it as you also pointed out that “engine tick” time is the the same as “sequencer” time. But even with the parameters spaced out exactly as they are from the sim, the MRQ output is at half the frame rate for some bizarre reason. Any ideas?
I even thought, maybe what actually needs to happen is a sim frame count of 429 divided by the FPS in sequencer (24), which comes out to 17.875…and try that instead in the Start Time parameter, but its same result, just outputs at half stepped frame rate regardless of what sequencer changes are made.
What version of the engine are you using? The video was done a couple of years ago and was probably 4.26-4.27, which may actually have some differences in terms of workflow. Some good reference on all of this has been posted here since my vid. Here’s a link: Chaos Destruction | Learning path
I’m in 5.2. After a lot of trouble shooting issue turned out to be I was not using Anti Aliasing in my MRQ for Lumen rendering, turning that on adds the correct amount of frames are really “subsamples” from the engine that is needed to make a completely 24 fps. This must only apply to certain systems like particles or in this case Chaos, as for emissive based lighting in total darkness I skip AA since it introduces way too much splotchy flashing light noise.
Hi! Does anybody have an issue using chaos cache manager with stencil layers? If I don’t use layers the simulation renders ok, but with layers, there is no simulation at all. Engine version 5.3.2