Blooming plants solution?

jordank95

Looking for a way to show a plant growing from a bud to full-bloom. Would blend shapes work for this? I have 2 models of the plant - one is a bud/non-bloomed version and the other is a full bloom version. Im using UE4 and trying to figure out the best way I need to set up my models in Maya and then the best way to set this up in UE4. Im posting in the Technical Talk forum because I believe it would be the same solution for other engines as well, so I apologize if its the wrong forum! Any help would be great. Thanks guys.

Eric Chadwick

Depends how complex your flower is.

Visual examples would help a lot when asking questions like this. 


Something like this could be mostly done with skinning, though it'd be a lot of bones.

Blend shapes wouldn't work since usually the vertices move in a straight line from pose to pose. These flower petals rotate open from their bases.

A combo might work best. Blend shapes for the tough parts like petals expanding from shrunken to flat, then skinning for larger motions like petals rotating outwards and for the plant bobbing while it's growing.

gnoop

For something simple it could be an alpha  animation in a shader.    You model  have  a bud and full open petals at the same time  and the shader  makes open petals invisible first,   then  gradually does    it all visible.     Wouldn't be same cool looking although .

poopipe

it sort of doesn't matter how you author the effect. 

You can convert bone animation to blendshapes, you can convert any sort of vertex animation (sims, blendshapes etc) to bones - you can convert any of that to a vertex animation stored in a texture that unreal can eat quite happily

worry about how to animate the effect you want  not about shoving it up an engine. 


personally I'd be throwing bones and corrective blendshapes at what Eric posted but I've no idea what you need to make

SebKaine

if you are on the go fast mindest , rig + join + blendshape sounds like a perfect idea. 
but if you really want to push your studies. i will investigate houdini with 
- kinefx join chains
- vellum post sim with your kinefx anim as target ref geometry 
- then vertex animation texture for export 

This is very impressive work done with houdini, pretty hard to get such detail with keyframe and sculpt. 
https://opticalarts.studio/m-morris/
This is a showcase/ tutorial of the guy who do the sim on the previous link, some good tips.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaurkOt8-vs
This is good info to import animated geoache from houdini to UE with vertex animation
https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/game-tools-vertex-animation-textures/