Accurate Physics Simulation
Chaos Physics System
Work continues on refining the physics simulation within Holodeck, with a focus on using the Chaos physics system. Chaos handles mass very well, but I've encountered an issue when placing a lot of weight on a light object, such as a table. Here's a demonstration:
Another challenge I'm facing is with collision detection in objects composed of multiple hulls. Currently, objects tend to glitch in-between the hulls, causing unstable physics interactions.
Rendering Glitches Without a Landscape
The absence of a landscape in our scenes is causing a severe rendering glitch. Unreal Engine appears to misinterpret all pixels as out-of-bounds when there's no landscape present. This leads to significant visual issues, such as the disappearance of roughness and world normal passes.
Performance in Nanite Scenes
Performance is decent with a fully populated Nanite scene, including foliage. Here are some visuals of the scene and its performance:
I've managed to get Nanite working in VR, which is a significant milestone:
However, Nanite foliage with World Position Offset (WPO) wasn't outputting correctly to the velocity buffer, causing severe artifacts. Setting r.Velocity.EnableVertexDeformation resolves this issue.
Baking Textures to Vertex Color
With the high number of vertices in Nanite meshes, I'm exploring the possibility of eliminating most, if not all, textures in our materials for simple objects. In this example, I baked the albedo to the vertex color and used simple math to approximate basic roughness and specular maps. The result is both promising and highly performant.
Stay tuned for more updates as I continue to push the boundaries of VR development in Holodeck!