Animating a blob, soft body animations?

NBLM

Hello, I want to make such a blob wobbling animation for real time use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYa6a4L4MzU

I tried it with a geosphere and skinned a bone to every side (up,down,left,right,...) of the sphere and
then moved it outwards and inwards to get the desired effect but it looks really odd and just flatten the sphere.

It's not needed to get the little sphere's melt into each other,
I only want something that looks like a liquid in space.

Is that somehow possible with bones?

Mark Dygert

Depending on the engine there might be some deformers you can use, I know there is a deformer plugin for Unity that could add some surface noise that would do what you need. You might be able to bake down some vertex animation also, quite a few engines support that too.

But you could probably pull off something pretty convincing with bones but I think you might need more than 4 bones.

Chimp

There's many ways you can do this, most obviously a vertex shader but you might want to look into 2D metaballs with a clever normal map shadery goodness.

NBLM

Argh, I had never thought to do this with a vertex shader. So easy and simple.
But I also got some good results with the point cache modifier and vertex animations.

Thanks for the hints guys!