Deform and Move mesh along spline

I’ve used a similar technique for fish where you just move them along a spline instead of deforming them. It works fine…

The Timeline in the Event Graph is 10 seconds long and blends from 0 - 1 over that time.

This is the Construction Script. On false I’m just setting a default mesh so that it’s not ever empty. With this setup you can swap out the fish for whatever mesh you like.

If you’ll see this and still care - fish can be deformed via materials, with some vertex offsets with sinewaves and such. Check this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9NX06mvp2E I would go that route.

I had an idea just now. what if you rig the mesh. and have the bones move a long the splines? that way the deformation comes from the bones and the position and orientation comes from the spline’s current tangent. I don’t know if its possible, but its worth a try. I know I’m getting late to the party, but it might be usefull for others searching for something similar.

Hey Simon, I am looking to do exactly this, move the bones of a rigged mesh along a spline - did you have any success with this?

Hi there, do you have further info on how you accomplished this? As i can’t find much on this topic.

Thank YOU for the code! It’s VERY helpful!

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Ash, what a tease! You should share how you accomplished that :slight_smile:

Hi!) I don’t speak English very well, so it’s very difficult to explain) I carefully explored your code, looked a few tutorials on creating blueprints, then on how to add spline mesh and spline to them, and how to configure it. I had the task of making a water projectile, so the deformation of the model was important. I repeated the code one by one, but there was no result. Because when I created the Add Spline Mesh Component, I didn’t add my static mesh to it. After everything worked!) But now I’m trying to understand how to add a particle system to this projectile) The particle system does not want to connect to the nodes known to me in the spline blue print. So there is something to do)

I’m trying to make sure I understand your question correctly;
You’ve used a spline mesh as a projectile and now you’re trying to add a particle system to it as well?

Firstly, I didn’t think you could add a spline mesh to a projectile, so not sure how you got that working. lol. I thought splines were static only, but maybe not?

Next, you’re trying to have a particle that starts at one point on the spline and ends at another point in the spline? As far as I know, you need a beam emitter for that with a Start and End point and then you can set them in a blueprint.

Here’s an example:

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Thank You for example) But its okay,
I was able to figure it out myself) No. I use spline mesh on spline, and i just created blue print for my particle system and made it a child of the spline mesh. It worked!) my projectile with the particle system moves along the spline) I set up an identical timeline in the blue print for the particle systems so that everything is accurate)