BioGrowth

BioGrowth blueprint generates creatures based on random cone-shaped splines + hierarchical instanced static meshes to maintain optimal FPS on complex structures.
From neural structures to horror trees to spherical organism to tentacle monsters with hundreds of eyes looking at the player…the creation is limited to your fantasy and imagination.
The creation is composed by 2 blueprint phases: a multi spline tentacle shape phase generated randomly by the algorithm or manually if needed, followed by a structure phase where you manipulate the final creature shape.
Creatures can rotate and vibrate following players movement and locations (i. e. imagine an horror tree with eyes attached as leaves, looking at the player and rotating to follow his movements.)


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Hi @VerumBit, This looks very interesting. Could make for some very nice HPLovecraftian Monsters. I would be curious about performance. Got a video?

Hi,
Video coming next week. I did a tree like the one in the above Pic with about 40 eyes lopening and looking at the player…I need to test it in VR to see the effect.
Yes, HPLovercraftian creatures could be an idea!
I’m testing some spline movements just changing the spline points locations (no skel mesh).
Lets see what comes out from these splines experiments!

Here the first test!

That looks Creepy, Freaky and Amazing. Is this using similar algorithms from your Fractal Tree package? (which I already own). Or is this a true growth algorithm.

When can i get my hands on this in the marketplace? Any option for early access?

Hi TechLord,
I’m creating this from scratch, no fractal tree tecnicque here because I’m using just splines.
As is today I created 2 ways to generate a tree structure:

  • one is automatic and the algorithm creates the tree based on input values such as n° branches, angles, spline points, but is so random that you can’t control the shape of the tre
  • the other is more a manual way where you edit the spline shape point per point (spline always maintains a tentacle shape), convert to a mesh and use it with some parameters to generate the tree. Here you have more control on the tree shape.

But I’m not yet satisfied :slight_smile:
I want to push it more and try to reproduce a real growth animation from a seed (sinle point spline) to a full tree structure where you can set growth speed so that you should see a single tentacle pointed spline coming out of the ground and grow up splitting in N lateral attached spline branches with a random ranged angle and each branch split again in another level of branches or have meshes attached (flower, leaves, eyes, skulls, candles, fire particles, dead bodies, etc)
I’ll watch some growth tree animation real life videos and see how to do a growth animation as realistic as possible.
All splines must use single Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshe (mainly cylinder or cube) with preset LOD to optimize FPS as much as possible and be faster in gamescene.

If this is reachable in short time, I’d like to see what happens when I attach a generated tree structure to a skeletal mesh with no mesh, using just branches: the idea is to make mannequins made of branches that are initially attached to a bigger tree splines structure similar in materials and shapes where the mannequins look like normal branches and see them detach from the main tree and attach you. Lot of work before reching this final goal, but it is a final goal to reach!

Hope to have a demo to share with you (will put the link here) by Tomorrow evening.

Subscribed!

@VerumBit

This discussion on procedural animation for tentacles may be useful.

PS: other proc anim articles by Alan Zucconi.

Thanks for the links! I have generaed a spline tentacle too, moving without skeleton. Will check that for inspiration