Not a definite one, at least not yet. No later than January though. If you setup GitHub access you can start testing and playing with all of the new features right now, btw.
Iâd like github access! (mittens)
[Edit] Oh, I should probably point out that I purchased it.
Great! In that case, simply email vdue4@.com the receipt from Epic along with your GitHub username and Iâll get everything setup for you.
Quick update: Wind Components now affect all VICODynamics Objects and you can even use the extended VDWindDirectionalSourceActor to have finer control over how gusts are generated.
The wind resistance algorithm takes into account the normals of the objects, so a part of a rope or cloth that is perpendicular to the Wind Vector will experience the most drag as opposed to the part that is parallel to the wind vector.
And yes, you will be able to create parachuting bunnies 
. Iâll post a test of that once the tension constraints are finished
Let the bunnies hit the floor, let the bunnies hit the floor o/`
A bit more refined wind drag approximation, especially for cloth:
Wind approximation is pretty much set for the update. Onto wrapping up the rest of the update 
This might be a dumb question, but can a characterâs body block the wind if we want it to?
Not dumb at all! I actually thought of adding a way to do that by allowing you to specify a max wind occlusion distance and having particles check for occluders during wind approximation. But talked myself out of it due to performance overhead when used on many soft-bodies at once.
I think Iâll go ahead and add it because it would be super cool 
. Not to mention useful.
Do note that having many soft-bodies check for occluders will impact performance so this would be used sparingly.
Forgive me if this has been asked or addressed, but in the upcoming cloth update, if I were to take, say, a static mesh representing a cloth robe with a hood or something similar, could I apply cloth physics to it and have it collide with the body mesh that itâs encompassing, so to speak? I have a character without any skeletal meshes, itâs just a collection of static meshes; a body, a clothing item, and a mask. If the clothing item simulates the cloth physics you provide, would it work similarly to an Apex cloth piece on a skeletal mesh, colliding, flowing with motion, etc?
AMAZING work youâre doing here, thanks for your efforts!
Cheers!
The biggest advantage of APEX Cloth is that it was built on the presumption of being used on skeletal meshes as clothing and because of that their system has extremely specific techniques to produce the great looking clothing results.
My system was/is built as a general purpose soft-body system, and that presents challenges for specific use cases such as clothing where many micro-collisions have to be resolved. In-short, the results with fast moving rigid bodies will not be comparable, visually, to apex for the time being.
With that said, however, Iâm planning to add support for better handling clothing on characters. Especially since our game will be needing it soon anyway. There are two main things that need to be implemented, first being per-face collision resolve because the current per-particle setup will not be accurate enough and second being the ability to properly impart velocity onto the colliding cloth pieces. Currently, a fast moving rigid body could partially intersect a cloth piece if the piece is still. And this stems from how rigid body collision is being handled, no thanks to the inability to inject proxies into PhysXâs broad-phaseâŚ
I do want to note that in your case, you could have the bits of the cloth that are in close contact with the body mesh marked as âfixedâ and have the extremities simulate. But Iâm not sure if that look would suite your needs.
Thank you, my pleasure!
For attaching a simulating actor to the tension rope do I need to use the âAttach Simulating Actorâ Node or is particle attachment also working?
At the moment both of it doesnât seem to work for me. Rope stretches for forever and the rope only collides with the object nothing else.
Somehow it does attach to the actor even if the actor is not actually simulating with the âAttach Simulating Actorâ Node. Dunno if thatâs normal.
Or does it not work when I have more than 1 particle attachment defined?
That sounds like it could work in my case, do you mark the bits of cloth by vertex I assume?
Cheers!
Yep, correct.
Are you doing the attachment from BP or in the Properties Editor?
Also, could you describe how your TensionRope component is set up? What properties did you set and to what?
Aha, ok try this: remove the second Particle Attachments entry because it is overriding the AttachSimulatingActor attachment. And you will need to set the Offset property under Tension Transfer to something so that the attachment is not to the center point of the rigid body.
This should solve it for you, let me know.
Thank you I will try it out tomorrow. Another question:
I want to shorten the rest length of the rope while playing. Itâs not really working though. I press the button, the variable of âLengthâ of the rope changes, but I donât see any change in the rope. Itâs still only tight when Iâm 1000 units away from the origin of it (I set the new variable to 500 while it was 1000 before that).
Is it not possible to change the rest length in real-time?
I want the player to be able to shorten the rope when needed so itâs always tight.
Oh, that variable is only used during construction. Iâll make a note in the code regarding that.
And you are right, there isnât a helper function to change the rest length without going through each constraint and shortening it. Itâs on my todo list now, thank you!
Seems like another feature that would benefit from a âLODâ type thing where soft bodies only check for occluders when theyâre close to the camera.
I figured the base system would not be for the performance minded, I myself didnât really intend to use it during actual gameplay, but instead use it in sequencer and render the cut-scenes
(if it did work well in gameplay, then awesome! but itâs not important enough to slave yourself over it)
And voila:
Real-time wind occlusion! Notice the small gap at the bottom of the walls, it actually lets a draft through if you look carefully at the rope and cloth. So you should be able to create pretty intricate setups with that level of precision.
And you are correct about having this use an âLODâ type setup, but I think Iâll leave that up to the developer since toggling it simply involves setting a bool. I will however add a coarser grain, high perf, alternative which will only use the bounds for checking wind occlusion of the entire object.