Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 29, 2019. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
With Chaos, Epic Games presents its future physics and destruction system: at GDC 2019, there was a real-time tech demo including a tech talk. The engine’s new features are intended above all to make it easier for developers to destroy their worlds better. Epic Games only recently released the new RTX real-time ray tracing features in the 4.22 preview version.
The Features and Development of Chaos
The real-time tech demo shown is set in the world of Robo Recall. With Chaos, artists are supposed to achieve massive destruction in real time in the respective scenes while being able to use useful control options. Chaos will also include further aspects in order ultimately to replace PhysX completely – although the talk focused mainly on the destruction features.
Among other things, the previous system lacked the ability to create more complex scenes, pass them on to corresponding DCC software in the pipeline and make fast iterations. The new concepts in Chaos therefore include, among other things…
- Geometry Collections as a new asset type for destruction.
- Fracturing with various methods, such as Voronoi, Clustered Voronoi, Slicing, Radial and Planes, which are also supposed to be combinable and adjustable via various parameters.
- Clustering for developing different looks and styles by grouping and dividing individual Geometry Collections into different levels. This can also be used, for example, to divide the number of broken objects.
- Fields are used to change various parameters through a kind of volume selection and application. Anchor, Strain, Decay and Disable Fields are shown as examples in the demo, but they are also supposed to be individually creatable via Bleuprints.
- Connection graph for creating dependencies between clusters
- Cached simulations especially for larger simulations, although parts of them can also become dynamic again as soon as they are interacted with.
- The Niagara effects system is also integrated.
Availability
Demo features for the new Chaos physics and destruction will be released in version 4.23 of Unreal Engine. You can find more information on the Epic Games website.
More from the Game Developers Conference 2019
At GDC 2019, there were also further tech talks about Unreal Engine, all of which you can now watch here. Alongside Chaos, the content presented includes new features for the mesh pipeline, ray tracing in UE 4.22 and new features and developments of the audio engine.
