Voxel Plugin For UE4

[mordentral]

@BoredEngineer;438010

More of pre-calculating on the level of necessary components and then optionally grouping into a bigger voxel, if components change their location in real-time too much.
For example, something like a boat hull would be pre-calculated into voxels and in real-time voxels will only be queried if specific piece is in contact with waterline or completely submerged.
There are other cases like for example a landing gear of airplane which not only adds to cross-section drag but can “shadow” part of airfoil from getting airflow.
It might sound silly, because all this can be solved programmatically in advance if you know what kind of vehicle you have. But I’m looking at it from the perspective of game where users can build their own vehicles and general shape or placement of animated components are not predefined.

While possible with voxels I would assume that you would get better/easier results with convex hulls / using physx convex hulls for it. They are already built in to whatever accuracy that you set them too and wouldn’t require a new pipeline to implement. You can get the mass / density properties of Physx as well in the bodyinstance and convex shapes data. Using voxels would be more memory intensive (already have the physx data) and potentially less accurate depending on the scale of the volume, voxel data would be better suited for fluid simulation or gas flow or force propagation than something like that I would assume. Also surface area calculation with a hull would be pretty easy to take the surface area of each tri and add them together if using a tight fitting hull wouldn’t it?