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View Full Version : Epic: How does vehicle damage work?



WickedPenguin
10-20-2007, 10:38 AM
I've been studying the damage models for each of the vehicles, and I'm a bit stumped.

As has been noted, the vehicles now receive localized damage. If you shoot the Goliath from the front, only the front becomes damaged. After a while, certain pieces start breaking off the vehicles. For instance, the Raptor loses part of its "wing" and the Manta's nose can be nearly shot off.

How is this done? Is it only a texture change + a specialized emitter for the part that flies off? Or is it an all-new mesh that's replacing the old one? I can't really tell as we can't use the "rmode" console commands in the demo and can't open the packages in the Roboblitz editor. I've also test-shot the space where the old part used to be and haven't come to a conclusive answer. It seems as if the mesh is actually changed, but I'm not 100% sure. Maybe there's some Normal map trickery, maybe not. If we have to build additional models for every stage of damage it adds to our planning and development time.

In addition, I've noticed that the damage actually increases as you shoot the vehicle. If you fire at the Goliath's front, the texture will change and the front will actually appear to recede a bit. It looks almost as if the damaged texture is fading into place on top of undamaged texture, but it definitely appears to have some depth to it. How is this done?

Can you give us some insight?

Marsfyre
10-20-2007, 09:24 PM
try the "viewmode wireframe" command

WickedPenguin
10-20-2007, 09:35 PM
Ahh, very nice. I'll try that.

WickedPenguin
10-24-2007, 01:41 AM
Shameless self-bump. (I be vewy, vewy cuwious).

re8
10-24-2007, 02:26 AM
Shameless self-bump. (I be vewy, vewy cuwious).I don't think EPIC is watching this forum; try the other ones bro.

-=¤willhaven¤=-
10-28-2007, 12:27 AM
I'm not entirely sure how the actual deformation is done. I believe it uses morph targets and a percentage to dictate how crunched things are. Parts breaking off are likely bones that instantly scale down to zero and spawn an emitter and/or physics object.

I do know for sure I've seen a masked texture with a color used for each corner of the vehicle to control how much of the damaged material gets applied to the vehicle and where.

jansoft88
12-24-2007, 02:59 PM
I've been studying this (sorry for bumping an old topic, I hope it's not against forum rules), So far this is what I have been able to find out. There are 4 or more morph targets for each vehicle (e.g. the manta has one for front, one for rear, one for left and one for right), further more every vehicle has a "burntout" material. When damage occurs, the appropriate morph target kicks in the appropriate ammount (i.e. slight damage to the front wouldn't transition between the ref pose and the front damage morph target 100 percent, instead it would be something like 20 percent and would keep slightly increasing as the damage does).
What I can't understand is this, How does the transition between the default material and the burntout material take place? This thing doesn't seem to be taken care of in the .uc files which leads me to believe that it has something to do with the material instances inside of UnrealEd.
Huhh,,, ok .. after that long rant, I seem to be going nowhere, Can anyone help???