Using Apex in UE5 Early Access

Hi everyone,

There seems to be some confusion about the use of Apex Destruction tools in UE5 Early Access. This is a reminder that PhysX (along with Apex) are disabled by default in favor of Chaos Physics and Chaos Destruction.

You can learn more about Chaos Destruction by looking at the documentation here. Since UE5 comes with Chaos enabled by default, you can disregard the steps to enable it from the docs.

If you need to use Apex Destruction in Early Access, you can download a source build and follow these steps:

  1. Go to the Engine > Source folder and open UnrealEditor.Target.cs in your IDE.

Apex1

  1. Add the following lines inside UnrealEditorTarget:

  1. Recompile the engine.

Thank you!

-Jorge

2 Likes

I tried using this method but it won’t build.

I also tried this (several times) but it wouldn’t build. I don’t have the error log at hand, but the errors mainly seemed to focus on operators, so maybe the problems was with the .NET framework, as I understand that is being utilized too, even though it wasn’t mentioned in the github readme. I definitely had all the prequisites mentioned on the readme / docs. Coincidentally (or not?) many if not all of the errors were from classes related to Apex, physx, nvcloth.

Seems this is redundant in preview 1, I know epic doesn’t care but there are a number of people that would still like to use apex at lest or at lest offer people away to convert there meshes over to buggy Chaos!

Any update to this? I really miss the behavior of Destructible Meshes. Geometry Collections don’t handle the same way.

They seem to be pulling away all support towards switching back despite chaos performance being well over 75% below that of physX.

You have to poke into the source files manually with a compare tool and revert some changes to get a succesful physX build.

And while at it, you should also update the version of physX anyway.

Thank you. Yikes. I hate losing physics on the individual pieces that break away now that we have Geometry Collections. Do you happen to know how to access the individual pieces as actors once a geometry collection falls?

I hate the apex system so much that I just made my own.

At hart, it’s just a geometry collection.
You should be able to do a line trace and retrieve an index for the specific piece - out of which With which (using a get out of the geometry collection actor) you can access and manipulate it’s transform.

In practice, make your own system and you’ll have an easier time… particularly if you have to dig into the source to figure it out anyway :stuck_out_tongue:

Hey there. I am doing this myself. Do you happen to know what call or property you access on the GC to get a handle to the individual piece? So far I am unable to find one.

Why on GC?
Not sure I’d set it up that way in the first place. In my case the pieces remain where they sit until player interaction.

I was referring to this comment. You mentioned doing a line trace to get an index (?) to the specific piece and then manipulate its transform. I am trying to figure out how to get to that specific piece like you mention.

— Edit

Oh wait, are you saying you created your own implementation of a geometry collection? If so I misunderstood your post. I thought you were saying you used your own extension of geometry collection.

Making your own GC implementation makes more sense and is something I was considering as well.

Ok ok. Careful with that. GC is Garbage Collection. not Geometry Collection.
That’s mostly why your comment made no sense.

Yea I ended up making my own geometry collection.

However, even using the apex one a line trace should return an Index when it runs over a piece that’s part of some collection (foliage is the same).

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Oh crap! Thanks for making that clear!

I wanted to see if Unreal 5.0 could use PhysX without too much blood sweat and tears, and it could. This is more of a hacky proof of concept than an actually solid PhysX integration, but it works.

https://markjg.com/blog/physx-in-ue5/

2 Likes

Interesting because last time I went and tried it took a lot of sweat mostly (being LA in August its probably unrelated to the task at hand :P).

I for one appriciate the share.