Soft-tire squish and sidewall bulge for any wheel mesh — no vehicle plugin required.
Convincing soft-tire deformation to any vehicle, with zero dependency on Chaos Vehicle or any other vehicle system. Drop the component under any wheel mesh and it handles the rest: detecting terrain contact, tracking it smoothly frame to frame, and driving a GPU-side material deformation that flattens the contact patch and bulges the sidewall realistically — all without touching physics setup.
Built for off-road and crawler-style vehicles where tires need to visibly conform to rocks and uneven terrain, but flexible enough for any wheeled vehicle that wants extra visual fidelity.
Key features:
Works with any mesh-based wheel — no vehicle plugin dependency
Smooth, frame-rate-independent contact tracking
GPU-driven deformation via World Position Offset — no extra draw calls
Sidewall bulge, contact flattening, and rim-safe displacement clamping
Optional contact-based force feedback for suspension response
Bonus general-purpose sphere deformation component included
Fully exposed parameters for trace pattern, deformation strength, and smoothing
Includes a ready-to-run demo level and demo materials
Note: Windows only in this version.
DOCUMENTATION(pdf)
Video Demo (youtube)
VEHICLE SETUP GUIDE (youtube)
Thank you for your hard work! I’ve finally figured things out for the most part. The only real challenge is getting a good-looking deformation effect on large tires, but other than that, it’s an absolutely amazing plugin.
Hi! First of all, thank you for a great plugin. The performance and raycasting system are fantastic. However, I am currently developing a heavy off-road truck simulator with oversized wheels, and I’ve noticed that achieving a convincing, high-quality look for large tires is quite difficult with the current shader setup.
The main issue with large tires is that linear vertex compression alone makes them look too soft, like clay or foam, rather than heavy-duty rubber under immense weight. Like sugar in marmalade, the right vertex distortion behavior is exactly what gives the shader that high-end, premium look!
To make your plugin the ultimate solution for all types of vehicles (and even more valuable on the Marketplace), I would highly recommend adding advanced WPO features for physical tire behavior:
- Sidewall Bulging (Lateral Expansion): When the tire compresses against the ground, the vertices on the sidewalls should expand outward along the local X/Y axes, creating a realistic ‘flattened’ profile under weight.
- Tread Wrinkling / Accordion Effect (Proportional Distortion): The compressed area needs parameters to create subtle волнистые folds (an accordion effect) where the rubber bunches up at the contact patch, instead of just scaling flat.
- Stiffness / Elasticity Falloff Curve: A curve parameter to control how the deformation spreads from the contact point up the tire carcass, ensuring the top of the big tire remains perfectly round while only the bottom deforms dynamically.
Upgrading the shader with these features will elevate the product to a true AAA-tier tool, making it highly attractive to developers of heavy vehicle simulators. I would love to see these updates in the future! What do you think?
Also, to help you with development and testing, I can send you the 3D models of my oversized off-road wheels via email. I am the original author and creator of these models, so you can use them freely for internal testing and shader debugging with zero copyright issues. Let me know if you are interested, and I’ll send the files right away!
