Fluid Actor with buoyancy vs Animation

Chaseingames

Hey forum peoples,

This is my first post so please forgive my noobish ways. I'm currently working on this Ice cave level and want to have Ice chunks bobbing and floating on on the water surrounding the obelisk. I was hoping to be able to get it going in the engine rather than animating it in maya, but its looking to be far easier to just let it happen. If anyone has another way to go about it I would appreciate the insight.

Chaseingames

I've converted the Ice chunks from static meshes to Kactors and assigned them to the same collision channel as the fluid actor.... Yea still no idea what I'm doing, should I constrain them to one another or am i simply missing something. UDK wizard where art thou?

sprunghunt

You could just animate them in matinee

Chaseingames

@sprunghunt thanks for the suggestion! I was hoping to use physics in UDK, but alas I'm animating it in Maya against my will. Is animation in matinee similar? I've only used it to setup a cam fly threw

sprunghunt

Chaseingames wrote: »

@sprunghunt thanks for the suggestion! I was hoping to use physics in UDK, but alas I'm animating it in Maya against my will. Is animation in matinee similar? I've only used it to setup a cam fly threw

animation in matinee is what I would reccomend over using maya to animate unless it's a complex animation. This is because usually doing this kind of animation in maya requires a new unique mesh which is difficult to set to interact with the player.

and it's quite easy to do. It's fairly similar to using maya or something.

Chaseingames

@sprunghunt I'm gonna give that a try. I really want to get these Ice chunks bobbing in my environment. I have little to no desire to pursue animation, especially after attempting to animate verts on a plane. Talk about counter productive. Thanks again for the tip