A few days ago, we featured Tyler Wilson's "sqworm" demo showcasing his tension solver, and now the project is complete and ready for release. TensionFX calculates real-time stretch and squash deformation on the GPU every frame and passes that data to your materials, so they can react with wrinkles, blush, roughness changes, color variation, detail normals, and virtually any custom response.

As the developer explains, most wrinkle systems, including MetaHuman's built-in solution, are animation-driven. TensionFX takes a different approach, so no rigging of individual expressions is required. Because it's geometry-driven, it can react automatically to any source of deformation, including skeletal animation and skinning, morph targets and ARKit blendshapes, and ML Deformer output.

Please note that alembic and geometry caches are not supported, as they contain pre-animated data and lack a rest pose for comparison. TensionFX works with Unreal Engine 5.4 and later, and requires the Deformer Graph plug-in to be enabled.

For detailed setup and usage instructions, see the documentation here. You can purchase TensionFX by clicking this link.

With Unreal Engine 5.8 just around the corner, now is the perfect time to catch up on the experimental Mesh Terrain system and other upcoming features:

If you're looking for more useful Unreal Engine resources, check out Chosker's guide on implementing colored shadow penumbra.

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