PhysX lab and Unreal Engine 4

Hi guys. Can someone give me link to a tutorial or tell me how to make absic wall using PhysX. I haven’t yet downloaded physX lab and i don’t know is there a sense to do it. Im a pretty begginer in UE4. I’ve always wanted to make game where you can destory everything. I can model building in blender and export this building intro .fbx .
Can someone tell me how to make it fully destructible? I mean not 1 shot and all building go to hell. I mean every shot makes small hole and maybe grenade doews bigger hole

Hi 01zabil01,

This is a pretty good start when using PhysX Lab: https://developer.nvidia.com/apex-destruction-physxlab-tutorials

There are some basic and more complex tutorials here to help you get your Destructibles in order.

I would say that there is need for PhysX labs if you want more complex looking destruction. Unreal Engine only offers Voronoi pattern destruction rather than offering the other methods that are included in PhysX Lab.

The methods with Voronoi are pattern based whereas in PhysX Lab you can use custom masks to make your own pattern and types of destruction. UE4 only offers a single depth of destruction as well (Layer 1 = base mesh, Layer 2 = destroyed) whereas PhysX Lab allows up to 5 depth layers. This can provide a much more realistic destruction asset as well, but may not be what you need. It really just depends.

To speak to your example, this is probably not the best solution that you’ve described.

With Destructibles it’s imperative that your asset be a contiguous closed mesh. There cannot be any holes/open faces otherwise you will get errors with holes in your DM.

If you want to build something like a destructible building, it’s important that you learn to build assets in a modular way and smaller way. This method of using modular pieces (think Lego Blocks) will allow for a more refined destruction and optimization. There is a hard coded limit of 2000 fracture chunks that are available for in your world at a given time. If you’re doing a larger building this would need many more pieces to work well. Using smaller modular pieces can give you better results when set up properly.

Using the flags in the DM for “Form Extended Structures” can help to make a cohesive object out of single DMs that are snapped together.

Using a Support Depth of 1 will allow chunks not to break free on a single hit unless they receive enough damage.

There are a lot of settings in the Destruction Mesh that can directly affect the results you want. It just takes time and reading through the documentation provided by Nvidia’s PhysX Lab to work out the best results.

We are working on improving documentation with destructibles and to better explain some of the settings. There is no planned date for this yet though.

I do a lot of work with DMs, so feel free to post on my forums thread here if you have questions, I don’t mind helping when I get free time to do so. [TUTORIALS] Photons Be Free: Mini-tutorials and other curiosities - Community & Industry Discussion - Epic Developer Community Forums

Thanks!

Tim

1 Like