How do you make an effect like this?

Dvonio

Hello, I'm wondering how you can make an effect like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjpEV0vzDpk

The first part where the bees are walking in his hand.

Do you animate them on max/maya/blender etc, make them follow a path via programming inside the game engine or ... ?

Thank you very much.

Dvonio

Up?

Eric Chadwick

This is a cool effect!

To get better responses, it would help to compose better subject lines.
For example: "How animate Bioshock bees walking on FPS hands?"

I suspect they just brute-force animated each bee. The hands don't change shape, not much anyhow.

I know Irrational Games used 3ds Max and Unreal to make Bioshock, and Max has an easy way to make objects animate along a spline. From there it's easy to bake that down into regular position/rotation/scale keys, which a game like Unreal can load easily. 

Mark Dygert

It's probably a particle effect.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/ParticleSystems/

If it wasn't done in unreal through cascade then it could have been done with the 3dsmax particle system then baked out. But I doubt that, It wouldn't have any randomness to it, unless they baked out several simulations and randomly picked one each time which seems wasteful and unlikely. Yep, I lean toward it being a cascade particle effect.

Eric Chadwick

In Unreal how do you get particles to roam across a mesh, like they do across his hand?

Like here:
http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=NjpEV0vzDpk#/15;18

FinalDragon

Eric Chadwick said:

In Unreal how do you get particles to roam across a mesh, like they do across his hand?

Like here:
http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=NjpEV0vzDpk#/15;18

The bee that goes up his palm actually clips into his middle finger if you look closely, then probably disappears; it's just hard to tell since it's so dark. This makes me think that it's simple movement rather than animated along a spline (which would probably require custom coding as far as I know). So, I think that you could just do that with carefully placed spawn positions with mesh emitters and a velocity-over-life module with some tweaked distribution values for their movement around the hand. Just gotta make sure the timing is good.

Dvonio

Thanks for the anwsers guys, We are using Unity, will probably make some splines and make the particles follow the splines with some variation, so we can have some randomness, Will post results! 

If anyone has more ideas they are welcome!