VICODynamics: a particle based Soft-Body physics Plugin

[VICOGameStudio]

@GeyserToo

Cool. If volume-preserving functionality is already in, then the development doesn’t seem protracted at all, and fluids can be expected within a year or so, right? Speaking of which, can you share your vision of what the fluid behavior will look like? (The current cloth and rope templates can already be used for some sticky/squishy fluids, but you’re actually aimin for freely flowing particles, colliding with everything?)

Also, have you tried selling VICODynamics to Epic as a native feature of UE4/5? I’m new to it, but so far it’s impressively stable and versatile compared to anything else I’ve seen.

That release timing really hinges on one of two things: either I find an additional dev(s) to help push features through at a steady pace or I find an investor to allow me to focus purely on VICODynamics. As it stands now, I’m prioritizing contract work and the game (Action Arcade Wrestling, on Steam and coming to consoles) in order to pay the bills and have an income. Finding devs and an investor would certainly be ideal .

Right now, the order of things is roughly this (order and inclusion may change, not set-in-stone):

1. Collision robustness, it’s decent, but needs better contact resolution implementation.
2. Support for skinned meshes, allowing painting of vertices which get simulated by VD on a skeletal mesh.
3. Decouple vertices and particles, allow lower detail soft-body to drive a high detail mesh (likely using linear blend skinning (barycentric coords))
4. Improve the in-editor experience by adding viewport widgets to edit and setup soft-bodies. As well as other editor related improvements.
5. Improve the quality of the tension constraint, like collision, it works well, but can be much more robust and more intuitive to use
6. Finnish support for tearing soft-bodies apart, was a weekend proof-of-concept but needs to be fully implemented.
7. Add tetrahedralization or voxelization of soft-bodies to improve shape-matching behavior
8. Fluids, this will be a big part
9. Add support for using as character clothing, this mainly involves optimizing collision and adding partial skinning to soft bodies when used as character clothing

Regarding the target behaviour of fluids; like everything in VD, I want fluids to seamlessly integrate with everything else in terms of collision/interaction. As well as be able to simulate liquid and gas behaviours. Yes, colliding/interacting with everything.

I have not approached Epic, but I did get an offer to have VD be part of the Sponsored Content thing. Though the terms Epic had did not align with what I have in-mind for VD in the long run, so I had to politely decline that opportunity. I may reach out to them and see what their thoughts are. And feel free to let Epic know that you’d like to see VD as part of future UE