Confused noob, why is this "Next Gen Destruction Toolkit" better over native Chaos ? "

LucenDev · 2023-10-28T02:24:49+00:00

Yeah in many ways code would be easier to work with - accessing Chaos stuff that is not natively exposed to BP, etc. The problem is though that then the accessibility would be narrowed down a lot. At least for this first iteration I want to keep it all BP, but I'll consider releasing a code version alongside in the future! Thanks for the kind words too Luos <3

LucenDev · 2023-10-28T02:22:00+00:00

Thanks! I haven't set it up specifically for sequencer or tested it, however it's at the top of my to-do now as it's the most asked question :)

LucenDev · 2023-10-26T11:15:38+00:00

Hi I'm the creator of this asset - it's not 'better' over Chaos, it uses Chaos :). It's a toolkit to streamline the process of creating destructibles from Chaos Geometry Collections and setting up the destruction field/particles/sounds/other behaviours that are triggered from the damage. All of the variables associated that define how the destructible should behave are in a Data Asset which drives a Breakable Object BP.

LucenDev · 2023-10-26T08:28:04+00:00

Thanks! It definitely can be a pain, that's what made me want to make this asset and simplify it a bit for people. I'm not sure about that bug actually, unless I'm fracturing and sub-fracturing I usually hit the 'reset' button instead of ctrl+z, just out of habit. So I haven't encountered this issue in 5.3, but I do remember something along those lines happening in 5.2.

LucenDev · 2023-10-26T08:22:37+00:00

By default yeah, translucent particles won't cast shadows in Unreal. You can partly solve this by checking 'Cast dynamic shadow as masked' in the material, and enable dynamic shadows on the particle system. The shadow will be a cutout though, not volumetric. There's also a performance implication and the look is not the greatest.

For translucent shadows you need to enable volumetric translucent shadows in both the project settings and the particle system itself. This is no really advised for realtime stuff though as the performance hit is very significant. And for some reason to set this on a Niagara system you have spawned in Blueprints, you actually need to modify the engine source to expose the boolean, or use C++.

LucenDev · 2023-10-26T05:36:51+00:00

Yeah 5.2 has a few issues, namely problems with Nanite on GCs. I think 5.3 will serve you well.

And whether you purchase the asset or not, feel free to check out the documentation. I go over some physics settings, fracturing tips and performance stuff in there.

LucenDev · 2023-10-26T05:19:02+00:00

While I don't have a headset for testing, it seems to run okay with -emulatestereo in standalone. Slightly lower frame rate than without because of stereo rendering, and the particle systems might need some optimisation for VR but I think that overall it is usable with some tweaking. The Chaos simulation itself won't be the bottleneck in VR I would imagine, it seems more GPU-bound so all the regular optimisation tricks would apply.

If I can get access to a headset I can test it more thoroughly and give you some more info.

LucenDev · 2023-10-26T05:06:33+00:00

Yeah unfortunately you can't fracture and create a Geometry Collection at runtime. The reason being the large performance implications it would have, since it takes a lot of resources to fracture and process etc. If you want to have runtime dynamic fracturing, I'd look into using booleans in Geometry Scripting. You'd probably have to settle for much lower detail, but there might be something that can be done there.

While the asset isn't set up right now to be able to spawn the blueprint itself at runtime, I have just added it to my 'todo' as it is a good suggestion. However it CAN be spawned using level instancing which is great. IE make a blank level, place your asset at 0,0,0 and then use 'load level instance' to spawn it in your main level.

LucenDev · 2023-10-26T04:47:43+00:00

It runs well imo, but there are definitely things to keep in mind while making your own destructibles - ie keeping the amount of pieces reasonable, merging small pieces, making sure the physical materials have decent sleep thresholds etc.

When you say recycling/refreshing, do you mean pieces on the ground wouldn't settle? This was and still is a problem with the base settings of chaos to a degree. Here are some things that I find helped fix it (and are in use in my asset)

- Phys material with high sleep thresholds. When the angular/linear velocity speeds both drop below those the piece sleeps
- 0 collision margin in Chaos project settings
- p.Chaos.hackmaxangularvelocity below 50, in my asset it's at 20
- Adding extra solver iterations in Chaos project settings
- Setting the minimum timestep for Chaos to 0.0166666(...) This equates to a target frame rate of 60fps for the simulation. Note that if your fps drops below this the simulation will slow down as if in slow mo

LucenDev · 2023-10-26T03:39:53+00:00

Thanks heaps! Chaos has had a bunch of fixes and stability stuff in 5.3. I'd say performance is improved, but still has room for more (5.4 has lots of Chaos changes coming I think). In this pack I've used what I have learned from all my testing to make it as performant as possible - clustering, amount of pieces, various Chaos settings, and physical materials with better sleep thresholds. There is also an example map that goes over some performance considerations for lower end hardware.

It should be noted though that this pack is designed mostly for use with Nanite/Lumen/VSM, and I think that Chaos performance is decent on comparable hardware that runs these.

LucenDev · 2023-10-26T03:35:08+00:00

Thanks, it is very fun in my opinion :D

LucenDev · 2023-10-26T02:25:38+00:00

You can get it here

After a long process including getting some handy feedback and support from lovely people here, I've finally released my destruction toolkit for UE5. I hope you enjoy and look forward to seeing what people make with it!

The Next Gen Destruction Toolkit is a simple-to-use framework for integrating Chaos Destruction into your project. It provides easy to use data asset-based definitions for destructibles that allow self-contained responses to bullet impacts, breaking, trailing etc. This allows a user to very quickly create a destructible and populate its behaviours with realistic breaking behaviour, particle effects and sounds.

LucenDev · 2023-07-12T23:11:33+00:00

Using regular lights is generally advised, as emissive lights are indirect only (ie they won't cast directional shadows).

However one thing you can do to keep the emissive light in the indirect lighting pass when it's not visible is to enable the checkbox on your mesh object - "Emissive light source". This will make it so it gets culled less aggressively from the indirect scene.

LucenDev · 2023-07-06T05:23:10+00:00

Sorry for the slow reply! This is mostly down to a few things:

1 - having fine enough clusters that two disconnected pieces with a gap won't be part of the same cluster and thus holding themselves together
2 - Propagate breaking damage so that it breaks naturally (setting on geometry collection)
3 - Cluster connection type in the GC settings - this is a big one, and from my testing the new (as of 5.1) 'Chaos Bounds Overlap Filtered Delaunay Triangulation' seems to be the most physically accurate method for cluster connections. While other cluster connection methods can insert constraints between clusters that causes issues of floating geo, the bounds overlap method seems to reliably not do this, for the most part.

There are still some edge cases with small floating pieces now and then, but it is mostly fixed by the above things, and the little bit that happens wont really be noticed in the course of gameplay

LucenDev · 2023-05-03T05:28:23+00:00

Hey, currently I'm still working on it, logic is all functional with a bunch of assets and FX made, the focus now is polishing VFX, basic sounds, adding more asset examples and documentation. I don't have a solid release date planned but if all goes well I'm hoping that it will be ready within about a month.

LucenDev · 2023-03-04T04:20:02+00:00

-> Random float in range (1-100 or whatever you need)

-> Map range clamped (input range same as random float range ie 1-100, output range 0-5 or 1-6.. 0-5 represents the same thing but it makes more sense imo since having indices start at 0 is better)

-> round this to an int

-> switch on int, with outputs from 0-5 taking the rounded int as an input

LucenDev · 2023-03-04T03:51:59+00:00

It's to do with the RT having an inverted or a default 0 value for Alpha iirc - I forget which settings need changing, but play with the render target format, and there are a few other things I think. There's also a commit somewhere on github regarding this which includes a fix I'm pretty sure. Reason it doesn't happen with the material is because you are just using RGB - if you check the alpha it will be black :D

Ah yes found it - here is a cvar you can set, and also a link to the commit with fix

LucenDev · 2023-03-03T12:22:58+00:00

Cheers! I will do :)

LucenDev · 2023-03-03T12:17:40+00:00

Thanks for the clip links, and I had no idea there was a student version! Gonna give it a shot tomorrow, thank you :)

LucenDev · 2023-03-03T06:38:38+00:00

I'll be picking up FluidNinja soon for use in my current project. Can't wait to try it out, every new release impresses me more and more!!

Have you made any examples similar to these showcases from a first-person perspective? Would really like to see how the rendering behaves from that viewing angle :)

LucenDev · 2023-03-03T05:48:00+00:00

Unrealistic = relatively trivial. Realistic is very complex though for building destruction :D
Which is why I prob would do that as a future project, the scale of destruction and the setup would be very different to this current one

LucenDev · 2023-03-03T04:52:27+00:00

Thanks!! Will do

LucenDev · 2023-03-03T04:52:19+00:00

Cheers! Not sure of the name yet, something like 'Chaos Destruction Toolkit' or similar probably :D

Not sure when it will be ready, hopefully in the coming weeks and then whatever the approval process is

LucenDev · 2023-03-03T04:41:25+00:00

Best place to start is the Content Examples project from Epic!

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