Hey,
So I was wondering if there was another way to create “realtime aging”. I guess a model swap would be the easiest solution. But can I use morph targets to slowly morph through all the different stages of age for a lion for example and still keep all the necessary animations(eat, drink, walk, run, etc.) of the skeletal mesh ?
I’ve seen some very cool morphs of some of the creatures of the half life mod “natural selection”
Thanks a lot in advance, awesome community! 
Is there really no way to create this via morph target ? 
Well you could do it as a morph but the more common way to add aging is either by normal map for small detail aging or displacement map for large detail aging.
Well, you cant do normal or displacement if you wanna age from a lion cub to an adult lion or can you?. And thats what he means… I think.
if you were making a human I’d say the best would be a combination of morph targets or displacement, and textures (diffuse, normal, etc)
for an animal or creature I’d say the same
Ah OK well then the quick answer is yes age from a lion cub to a adult lion as a full body morph can be done but it’s not a case of how to do it in Unreal 4 but how the asset is authored and imported into Unreal 4 using applications best suited for the task.
For example.
To make it work though there are rules that have to be followed so that the morph will work one being that one would need a master and a target of equal number of vertices with matching ID’s so the morph would translate from A to B points.
The real question though is there really a need to create what I would call a million dollar effects shot as compared to the ease of doing a simple model swap keeping in mind that a morph blend looks more like a blend without doing the morph as a progressive morph.
You likely also want to morph various channels of the material, changing properties like glossiness and normal maps.
(and, when growing old, starting to desaturate colors to gray)
Awesome 
I guess the tricky bit is to make the skeleton grow along with the morphs and have all animations that have been done for the baby version, then slowly (or quickly, depending on what you aiming for) transition to the adult animations, Ideally with an adult skeleton. I could imagine to use an aimOffset setup to blend the skeleton bone lengths to go from baby to adult. But Im not sure how easy that would go on the animations. Possibly not best solution.
But I guess if you had 2 separate rigs in maya and animated them separately. Then imported the animations simply to the same skeleton in UE4 while having baked every channel, you could just have 2 state machines in your animBP, one for baby containing all baby anims, one for adult containing all adult anims, and then just blend there in addition to the morphs.
To be honest, this doesnt sound that hard to me, I already have a blendable charcter model and rig so it isnt much I need to do (apart from creating some baby anims)… might just give it a go once my addiction to PoE allows me to spend time on other things
I was wondering about the exact same thing! Since porportions become totally different, how do you re-arrange the bones inside of the body ? Would love to hear from an Unreal Specialist how to create such an effect so it looks convincing ? Blending between textures is no problem, the geometry is morphed but what about the bones and animations ?
Well as a magic trick you could start with a cub model rigged and do a model swap for the effect model that does the age progression and then swapped at the end for a rigged adult version. This type of progression could be set up as a QT event if it’s just a visual effect and if the effect is only visual the animation and progression can be animated/authored in an application like 3ds Max or Maya (even Daz Studio).
The how to though requires a trip down the rabbit hole as it would take a combination of tricks to create a convincing effect and the best place for some ideas would be forums dealing with the creation of digital effects as the ability of creating the effect directly with in Unreal 4 is limited.
Since 3ds Max is my weapon of choice I know I can animate the morph and bone scaling a part of the total required animation for the effect model and import it into Unreal 4 as a one shot QT event.
So the short answer is sure this is the kind of stuff Hollywood has been doing for years but the question is does the asset require a real time element or is it something that needs to be staged as a visual effect only? If visual only then there are a ton of tools to play with including camera angles and cuts.
Still my favorite progressive morph. 
NWS
Haha! Practical > Digital Effects 
Ok. Well, the idea was to create this effect over-time, like there is real aging going on (from cub to adult in like 15-20 minutes). I guess I have to try this out in maya with morphs and if there is any way to re-arrange the bones and how the animations turn out to be. Thanks for all the suggestions and ideas!