Tall Grass Physical Interaction System - WIP #1

I was working on cleaning the blueprints of that old system in order to release the project to the public and while doing so, couldn't help but think that some of the things I did in it were just super dumb. And so what was at first a simple cleaning/documenting endeavor, turned out to be a complete rework of the system to include all the fancy latest tricks I learned.

And I'd say I'm pretty happy with what I could get from today's experiments: a system that provides a complex tall grass interaction system, something aimed to be more intricated (and expensive...) than your typical foot-height grass interaction system, one that allows per-instance custom physically-based interaction. It does *not* uses physics though! I feed an instanced static mesh component per-instance custom primitive data from a custom verlet point simulation and a custom sphere-segment collision algorithm.

This will have to be converted to C++ for sure though, because right now, although the implementation is pretty rough and could probably be optimized , the CPU cost of running this goes up to 4ms with 70+ instances simulated at once. Good thing though, GPU cost is close to zero! No render targets are used and the grass material uses a single RotateAboutAxis node and just reads the per instance custom data for the axis and angle.

Pretty happy with it :shrug: