Design and Performance Evaluation of Soft 3D Models using Metaball in Unreal Engine 4

Soft 3D models such as Slime need to use a variety of different animations in the same situation in order to show a natural dynamic appearance. Metaball can express soft objects well with a small amount of data, but it requires a lot of computation time for real-time rendering. Because of this, it is difficult to find models using Metaball in 3D games. This paper developed a 3D slime game character using Metaball by applying ray marching technique in Unreal Engine 4. In addition, 3D games including slime characters and general fixed game character models were produced and the performance of it were evaluated. Even if the number of slime characters is changed from 0 to 40, it has been verified that the rendering speed is maintained at 30 FPS (Frames Per Second) or more, so that the game can be played.