Interactive Vines using Niagara and Position-Based Dynamics | Unreal Fest Stockholm 2025

Watch Quentin Warnant present Rare’s latest explorations into making interactive hanging foliage—such as groups of vines—in this session recorded at Unreal Fest Stockholm.

He demonstrates how he’s using Niagara to implement a position-based dynamics physics solver and applying the results onto Nanite meshes.

Quentin also showcases ways to integrate external forces like dynamic wind and collisions on the simulation. There’s a discussion on key learnings from the content presented, as well as a look at potential future work to be done.

You’ll gain practical knowledge on the synergistic use of various Unreal Engine features, with an introduction to position-based dynamics as an algorithm and how to implement it in Niagara by using simulation stages, Grid2D collections, and custom HLSL nodes.

You’ll also learn how custom data interfaces are used to read bespoke mesh vertex data and control instanced material parameters directly from Niagara, instead of using Niagara renderers.

Additionally, there are tips on how to circumvent the limitation that Niagara can’t render Nanite meshes, to be able to deform Nanite meshes from the results of the Niagara driven simulation.

Learn more about Unreal Engine here: unrealengine.com

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