drilling a hole in real time

Hello,

Im already searching for days.
I would like to make a real hole in a mesh in real time. The player should be apple to use a drilling machine and make a “real hole” into the material. If the player drill 10cm the material should loose 10cm.

If there is a solution, i would appreciate it.

This is quite a difficult thing to do in a real time application if you want it to be completely accurate.

The first thing that came to my mind is the procedural mesh component, it’s not something I have a lot of experience with but maybe just check out a few tutorials on it.

I know slicing along a plane is fairly straight forward, but to make negative shapes is quite a bit of math as you need to work out the vertices and normals.

hi,
have you been able to simulate drilling the hole so far?
I am trying to do the same thing. i have used decals to put an image of a hole, but didn’t work.
i have also tried destructive mesh, but that doesn’t work either.
procedural mesh only creates mesh and doesn’t show material removal either.
any suggestions?

you could look into using voxels.

another option is using a depth mask
here’s a tutorial that I made on that.

then use world offset to control the depth of the hole.

the depth mask option doesn’t effect collision so you need to get creative. so something like a trigger volume to turn off the collision with the floor when an actor is over the hole then have a moving platform under the hole.

also translucent materials are more expensive the opaque so i wouldn’t try to apply it to an entire landscape. make a hill static mesh and blend that into the landscape then drill on top of it.

a third way might be to use a render target to offset the mesh.

thanks a lot for your suggestions.I tried to used render target to offset the mesh in the negative z, but there is a problem with that:
I want to show material removal in run-time like this video: “”
and so far I haven’t been able to do that. I dont want to have landscapes, as I only have to simple geometries that one of them is a machining tool, and the other one is the part to be machined.

and if i can only fake material removal, it might be even better

I don’t understand what part of the render target method you’re saying isn’t working.

the link i sent as an example shows material removal in x,y,z direction.
the render target seems to be only in z direction. and, in that tutorial, render target method was applied on a plane, and not on an object like a cube. or at least i dont know how to do that. render target method also pushes vertices in a direction, which is more of a deformation.
I am given a static mesh component like a box, and i want to be able to show the machining process as well as final result like the attached figure.

274738-capture.jpg

it doesnt have to be that precise, but i want to show something is happening, maybe faking it with colors. i dont need percision for conical holes or sharp edges or any specific geometry. just a rough process

you have to multiple the offset by the vertex normals rather than subtracting z