http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=101635
The script hasn’t been released yet, but so far the results are pretty cool. Question is, how would one get this into Unity?
thats awesome it looks really good, was that rendered or is that possible real-time with out being extremely CPU expensive?
In the thread the developer says that it’s rendering at about 10 seconds per frame, so I’d imaging it would take some serious optimizing to make the code work real-time. Still, there might be another way of getting this into Unity…
that looks awesome but i doubt anything near that accuracy of deformation would be make it into real time games anytime soon (with any engine ; )
From the videos, it looks very much like cloth physics to me. I’ve been thinking for a while that you could turn more or less any mesh into a ball-and-spring cloth object. The springs would be different lengths to keep the verts the right distance apart and preserve the geometry. The bend springs would be very stiff and each would have to be the right length to preserve the angles between the triangular faces.
I was looking at this idea as a simulation of an inflatable object rather than sheet metal. If you look at the car, you’ll see that the crumpled door panel “reinflates” and goes smooth again after it has made its way around to the other side of the post (hence my theory about how this was done). The mesh would have to deform plastically to be a realistic simulation of metal and I’m not sure if it’s easy/possible to add this behaviour to a simple cloth.
However, as it stands, this could probably be done in real time, at least for a low-poly object. I think Blender’s scripting is done in Python, so Unity’s Mono engine should handle something like this much faster. Mono also offers the possibility of generating loopless mesh deformation code at runtime using Reflection.Emit - this could speed things up even further.
Doesn’t look believable to me if you watch how the material still gets deformed after the impact.