Book Image

Unreal Engine Physics Essentials

By : Devin Sherry, Katax Emperore
Book Image

Unreal Engine Physics Essentials

By: Devin Sherry, Katax Emperore

Overview of this book

This book gives readers practical insight into the mathematical and physics principles necessary to properly implement physics within Unreal Engine 4. Discover how to manipulate physics within Unreal Engine 4 by learning basic real-world mathematical and physics concepts that assist in the implementation of physics-based objects in your game world. Then, you'll be introduced to PhAT (Physics Asset Tool) within Unreal Engine 4 to learn more about developing game physics objects for your game world. Next, dive into Unreal Engine 4’s collision generation, physical materials, blueprints, constraints, and more to get hands-on experience with the tools provided by Epic to create real-world physics in Unreal Engine 4. Lastly, you will create a working Vehicle Blueprint that uses all the concepts covered in this book, as well as covering advanced physics-based topics.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Unreal Engine Physics Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Simple versus complex collision


In Unreal Engine 4, we will be able to autogenerate collisions for our meshes that can be used in our game. There are two different types of collision that exist in Unreal Engine 4: simple and complex collision. Each type of collision serves its own unique purpose, and in this section, we will simply define each collision type and provide examples of each. Later on in this chapter, we will work on how to apply these collisions to our objects. We will also test these collisions in our game. Let's begin with simple collision.

A simple collision is a collision mesh that uses basic shapes, such as boxes, spheres, capsules, and convex shapes, to define the bounds of our object. Convex shapes are ones that have one or more interior angles that are less than 180 degrees, whereas concave shapes are ones that possess one or more interior angles that are more than 180 degrees, as shown in the following image:

In addition to these basic shapes, we can generate a form of...