Unreal Engine - Niagara fake softbody physics with static meshes
Another iteration on the fake soft body thing.
Figured out how to write the particle position to a rendertarget and use that as an world position offset in a regular mesh.
This was an earlier test with just the particles: • Unreal Engine - Niagara fake softbody physics
So how this works then:
1. In a Niagara particle system, spawn one particle per vertex of the mesh.
2. Run some simulation on the particles, a simple spring-damp thing, or you can do the same thing with the "pendulum" modules.
3. Write each particle position offset to a rendertexture, use the particle index for uv.
4. In the material for the mesh, read the value from the texture and use as a world position offset.
5. Then just use regular physics on the mesh, etc. The Niagara part have no collisions or anything, hence why it is completely fake.
One small thing is to check "Use Full Precision UVs" in the mesh doing the offsets.