Unreal 4 Bullet damage exploration
polycounter lvl 4
Hi guys!
I'm starting a project to see what I can get out of the unreal engine 4 bullet damage tools.
I'm starting out by exploring the basics, which means basic destructable meshes.
Feel free to give any tips and remarks.
Replies
shooting at a destructable mesh, fractured by unreal 4 itself.
negative about this is that all chunks are the same size, in big explosions this is clearly visable.
Next up, concrete pillar with fracturing done by Rayfire for 3ds Max
Bigger and smaller chunks, more variation
in an explosion the variety is clearly visable.
Next up: Wood, fractured by Rayfire:
pretty nice results so far
in an explosion, not that much variety.
So far so good, went over the basic of bullet damage in destructable meshes.
Next up is finding a way change materials with bullet damge,
for example, changing tiles to broken tiles, locally.
Tiles are to be chipped off in real time, by the bullet impact.
S.
I took a look at some Uncharted footage and took this screenshot:
I took this as a reference for the mechanics behind tile bullet damage.
Figured out a good way to create a destructable wall with 3 layers:
-Tiles
-Concrete
-Steel beams
fracture mesh of the tiles looks like this (500 parts):
Now I want to implement nvidia Flex into Unreal to get realistic sacks of grain working with bullet impacts.
In this case, the destructable mesh is only rendered once the wall is hit by damage. Before that it's just a flat box. You would have multiple wall pieces, so the game wouldn't have to render all the fragments at once, if that makes sense.
This might be what you were saying, but I got confused with 'I had many destructibles attached to a wall box'.
S
Not sure this will help but it might be interesting to you?
We had real-time destruction booleans happening in The Division.
(tiles is at the 1 minute mark of this video)
S
Anyways, how do you deal with the pieces that just stays in the air and floats after destructing a lower part of the mesh?
I want to get grain sacks in there that react to physics (bullet impact). I plan on doing that with the soft bodies from Nvidia Flex. Getting Flex implemented in Unreal 4 is not easy, so I decided to write a comprehensive tutorial:
1. Get an account on Github, and download the software.
2. Link your Github account to your unreal account: Head over to https://www.unrealengine.com/ , go to your account, and fill in your Github name.
If you refresh your Github account page, a new Icon should pop up that sais Unreal Engine. This means you linked your account succesfully. For those that can't get this to work, you'll need to go to GitHub.com/EpicGames and if you look at the top you'll see "View Invitations" if you done it right. Click that and accept it.
3. Clone the Nvidia Flex Tree. Follow this link: https://github.com/NvPhysX/UnrealEngine
Click the 'Open in Desktop' button. This will open Github, and start cloning the tree.
4. In the meantime download and install Visual Studio Community 2015: https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/
5. Once this is all done, you should have a bunch of files in the given file destination. Start with opening Setup.bat. This should download some files, no problems will appear.
6. Next, click the GenerateProjectFiles.bat file. This can generate some errors.
'ERROR: Windows SDK v8.1 must be installed' -> go to https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/windows-8-1-sdk and install the SDK
'No 32-bit compiler toolchain found in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio X.0\VC\bin\cl.exe' -> This error means that the C++ language is not setup in your VS. Go to your Visual Studio, and try to open a project with the C++ language, it should start downloading the C++ files needed to do so.
7. Load the project into Visual Studio by double-clicking on the UE4.sln file. Set your solution configuration to Development Editor and your solution platform to Win64, then right click on the UE4 target and select Build. It may take anywhere between 10 and 40 minutes to finish compiling, depending on your system specs.
8. After compiling finishes, you can load the editor from Visual Studio by setting your startup project to UE4 and pressing F5 to debug.
9. You can now start a new project or open a sample one, and start using Nvidia Flex.
EDIT: if you still get an error (Unique to the Flex branch, as I did), you can try unistalling Visual Studio COMPLETELY: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12584912/how-to-completely-uninstall-visual-studio-2010, this might take some time).After that you'll want to reinstall and do a custom setup, with the 'update 3' checkbox UNCHECKED.
When you now rebuild, you shouldn't get any errors.
S
lots of possibilities with this:
S.
Update:
An example of the softbodies I'm trying for the grain bags, I finally got custom meshes in there:
I also explored another route, bone based animation. I spent quite some time figuring this out, but I can now trigger an animation when I shoot the test meshes for the bags:
back to bone based animation:
current situation, you shoot the bag once, it deflates 1/3, and so on.
you can also shoot the bags 3 times rapidly, and the bag will deflate at once.
main bag blueprint:
also made a quick texture:
S.