HyperMatter

Autumn 2022: New Release: HyperMatter 1.4.0

HyperMatter is a plugin for producing high-quality (deformable and rigid) motion and effects.

Designed to be easy to use. A relatively small number of controls enable a wide range of motion styles and behaviours, including : swinging, falling, bouncing, rolling, slipping and sliding, general squash-and-stretch effects, inertial deformations , animatronics, etc, through to flying logos, flags and banners, underwater scenes, facial animation, skinning simple skeletal forms and characters, etc. . The possibilities are endless. Users with little (or no) knowledge of either dynamics or writing scripts can benefit from all that HyperMatter has to offer.

With just a few mouse-clicks you can create a controlling Hyp deformer object from selected Unity object(s), edit its material properties (including density, elasticity, incompressibility, friction, gravity, etc) and set its initial state. To control the motion and behaviour of an object you just need to add HyperMatter constraints, as and when necessary (only one or two constraints will be needed for the most common effects). Your object(s) are now physically based – and ‘alive’ in a very real sense: Pick an object up by a corner and it will swing and stretch all by itself. Release it, and it will fall to the floor, and bounce and roll and slide, just as objects do in real life – and with hardly any effort on your behalf.<br>

Combining HyperMatter’s physically based mechanisms with all the features available in Unity will open a huge range of possible effects, motion types and behaviours.

The plugin includes numerous example scenes, comprehensive tutorials and documentation covering all aspects of the plugin and background topics.

The use of HyperMatter 'User-Constraints’ enables developers to script their own custom constraint mechanisms. This is an extremely powerful feature, giving developers 'almost' complete control of objects' behaviour and motion.

Also, HyperMatter's accurate and robust Collisions routines enable incredibly realistic contacts/impacts between moving HyperMatter controlled objects - and also with Unity mesh objects.

There are so many effects and behaviours possible with HyperMatter that demo videos and example scenes can give only a tiny snapshot!

The new version 1.4.0 includes a new 'dynamic' deformer style that allows Unity objects to be moving and/or deforming relative to their controlling Hyp object, and for deformations to be layered, allowing one deformation effect can be superimposed on another. For example, eyes could be made to rotate in a deforming head, or hands turn on a deforming watch or clock. The new DefStyle editor also enable regular 'static' DefStyle deformers to be re-aligned, to acheive a better fit with their controlling Hyp objects. 

Version 1.4.0 also includes some new example scenes that demonstrate the use of scripts to control the behaviour of Hyp objects. Currently, these include two simpler scenes that illustrate the use of the new dynamic deformer style, and a more detailed and substantial example that simulates the real-time behaviour of a 'goldfish'. We are confident that these examples, together with some new demo videos (e.g. an underwater scene with two fish, a jellyfish and wafting coral, and a 'talking' bear-head scene), will inspire users to experiment and to discover the wide range of possible motions and effects that HyperMatter offers.

Please note: Version 1.4 of HyperMatter is currently available on Windows and MacOS platforms only (on Unity 2019.4.0 or higher).

As usual, we will continue adding (free of charge) new features over the next few months, including more advanced editing tools and more constraint methods.

In the Pipeline: In the very near future we will be enabling the core HyperMatter routines to run on graphics processors (GPGPU), which should produce substantial speed-up.