Developer TheLancaster showed a soft body tire system they made in Unity as a hobby project, designed for heavy machinery and off-road games.
What price range makes sense for a soft body tire system on asset store?
by u/TheLancaster in Unity3D
The system has two main parts:
- Wheel Structure Generator
- Physics Setup and Management System
The Wheel Structure Generator creates the tire structure by placing sphere colliders around the original mesh of the wheel.
Once it’s ready, the wheel is saved as a preset. After that, setting up a new one only takes a few steps, including the physics.
You can also rebuild the wheel whenever needed.
The second part is the Physics Setup and Management System. Once the wheel structure is in place, it connects all the spheres with joints.
Each connection has its own damping and stiffness settings.
The system ignores collisions between the spheres. While the wheel is moving, the sphere positions are constantly adjusted to help keep the simulation stable.
Lancaster used Unity's PhysX solver for the wheel collisions. This means the tire interacts correctly with other objects in the scene.
They also built an alternative spherecast-based version, which gives better stability at high speeds. Lancaster ended up using the sphere and joints version because it felt more responsive while driving.
If you want to follow TheLancaster's work, the link will be right below.
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