so this is rather a maya question than a ue4 question I guess. Anyways, right now I’m analyzing the Elemental Demo with its cool animations and effects and I just can’t figure out how you guys from Epic did these lava streams flowing down the rocks in the cave. I exported the “SK_LavaDripFlowAnim_02b” and imported it back to maya to see whats going on here. Seems like its done by using a cluster, animating every single vertice ?
Did you use a mesh following a path at first ? Whats the deal behind it ? How can I do/learn that ?
Sounds like vertex animation - instead of keyframing bones which are weighted to the mesh, it keyframes the vertices which have changed.
As for cloth, I’d check out APEX cloth, it’s not too hard to set up and gives a really nice effect. It’s basically just painting some weights onto the mesh with the NVIDIA DCC plugin and loading the resulting file as an APEX cloth asset in UE4. Often you’ll see it used in addition to an animation which just uses a spine like bone setup (which you could alternatively use by itself, though the result is harder to make look physically correct).
@n00854180t: Thx for the explanation. The lava is indeed keyframed vertices. I guess they used a shape that followed a path and then stretched out some vertices to have that “fluidish” look. Can you tell me how to do something like that ? I couldn’t find any tutorials on how to achieve this…
