Procedural Springs

Finally got around to converting our procedural spring system from our 3ds Max plugin and also our own game engine to Unity so we can use it on our game project and as a test for playing with and altering the new PBS Shaders in Unity 5. The PBS shader has been converted to be able to handle the deformation of a spring compressing and stretching, the spring mesh is procedural with numerous options to define the length, coil rate, coil spacing, spring diameter etc. The deformation of the spring is handled totally in a shader and the system also has a built in LOD system which automatically generates LOD versions of the spring and then manages those. And there is also a spring reference system so the spring data can be shared amongst multiple instances to keep memory use as low as possible. Anyway video below showing the system in action with the fab new PBS Shaders.

 

Hey Spooky awesome looking stuff.

The deformation of the spring being handled by the shader completely baffles me! Really that's awesome though!
But please forgive my ignorance, wouldn't it be more logical to have the deformation of the spring control the shader? i.e. The more compressed the spring gets the "redder" it gets.
Could you explain the benefit of having a shader control the deformation instead of the other way around?

I worked with the dynamic spring object in Max for several military project pieces and I ended up using the binding influence to animate the spring then linking the bind control object to one of the two actuator parts. Then I wired the actuator motion to a slider so anybody could use it without messing it up. When the actuator would open or close the spring would dynamically compress/stretch.
Of course as is with most cases setting up even small hierarchical systems like that are considerably easier in Max than they are in Unity. For me anyway.

 

@theANIMATOR2b - Sorry didn't get a notification about your post. The spring tells the shader the length of the spring and the shader will transform the vertices so the resulting output is correct. The spring system is based on the Max one so you just link the ends to objects and as they move a length value is computed depending on whether the ends are locked or not (the yellow spring is not locked in the video above the other two are) and passed to the shader so it just works.

 

Will this be available in the Asset Store?

 

Hi,

Any news?

 

Also curious about this. Will it be in the asset store? Is the ability to use multiple springs (multiple springs rates) on the same shock?

 

We got such little feedback on the system we decided that perhaps it wasn't really needed so we never got it ready for the Asset Store. If there is interest then I could get it split out from our car system and made into an asset again. @tfaith08 You are free to make as many springs as you like between objects, but just to say these are just mesh objects they are not physics objects, they are purely used to have a better looking spring with LODs etc in our car objects.

 

Let us know if you ever get this up in the asset store. My current project requires me to import an animated .fbx which utilizes the dynamic 3DS Max springs. Of course, that animation doesn't come through since Unity can't import those kinds of skin deformation animations. I'm sure there's a demand for something that makes it easier to import springs.

Side note, this is my first post to Unity Forum...shout out to theAnmator2b !

 

@SpookyCat it's a shame you didn't release this.