How to create a mesh animation such as this?

Hello everyone!

I was wondering if somebody could give me some general direction on how to animate a mesh like this to bring into UE4:

Is it possible to create the mesh and the animation inside of let’s say Houdini, and then import the fully animated mesh into UE4 and then apply a Material on top of it? I apologize if this is an overly basic question, I am not familiar with the Houdini/Maya to UE4 animation workflow.

Thank you!

Those are quite cool! Perhaps you could try simulating the effect inside of an animation blueprint by spinning your static geometry in 137.5 degree increments each frame? It seems to me that baking an animation in a separate program wouldn’t be practical if you want something that can play for a very long duration - it probably rules out morph targets (which were my first thought)? Currently, I don’t think you can import pure vertex animation.

I’m very curious to hear other thoughts on this. :slight_smile:

I heard you can animate geometry by rigging it in some way but I unfortunately don’t know anything about rigging and I could be totally off. Now that I have figured out how to make flipbook textures with Houdini, this is going to be the next thing I try to figure out.

I see many cubes rotating.
I guess a particle system or many cubes

Zark is correct on the approach, You could do it with many cube particles, Or you could do it with a Geometry cache, I am not sure if that is supported in UE haven’t digged but you could animate it in your program and export it as an alembic cache sequence.

It looks like there’s no support for importing alembic cache sequences yet :frowning: I wish I could cache animations made inside Houdini and bring them into UE4! That would be awesome.

This is what I tried today:Trying stuff with vertices - YouTube
However this is very limited since I can’t control the cubes motion in world space very precisely. Next time I’m going to try mesh particles and modifying the cubes size via materials or particle lifetime. I feel like there must be an easier way to bake the animation into the mesh or something. At the end I would ideally like to be able to put a single material on top of this moving mesh which makes things a lot more complicated. It looks like MacroUVs also don’t work on mesh particles so that’s not an option.

Try out Fabric Engine, I think that if you’re looking for something that specific it’ll be better to use it and it also has a WIP plugin for UE4 and also supports Alembic :wink:

http://fabricengine.com/

Fabric Engine UE4 Integration

Hey thank you for letting me know about this, I’ll definitely look into it.

If you just want some noisy cube rotations around a sphere, and you have some familiarity with vector math (which you’ll need even if you were to do this procedurally with rigged geometry), I would look into using the World Position Offset input in a material and maybe the RotateAboutAxis functionality there. It should be capable of a very nice effect, maybe even an accurate simulation of Fibonacci bloom. If you already know Houdini… carry on!

If you read more about how this was done. It is a 3d printed sculpture so it is static.

“…a bloom spinning at 550 RPMs while being videotaped at 24 frames-per-second with a very fast shutter speed (1/4000 sec). The rotation speed is carefully synchronized to the camera’s frame rate so that one frame of video is captured every time the bloom turns ~137.5º—the golden angle.”

It is not animating but it tricks the eye. It might be that if you created a statue that follows the rules that that guy set forth you could replicate the result. http://www.instructables.com/id/Blooming-Zoetrope-Sculptures/ If you did it any other way you would be trying to cheat what he did and probably would not get the exact same look. It looks like you can buy them here: http://www.shapeways.com/shops/edmark not cheap though. How he modeled it is very important to get this effect, its math art.

you could do this with an array on one cube… than multiply the cube… rotate the cube… and the array to get the “infinite motion” that he is getting… im not sure about baking that and getting it into unreal though.

It’s true that trying to actually re create the whole thing the way he did it is not practical, but really I’m just trying to emulate the effect. What I am going to try is roughly mimick the effect in Houdini and work on importing it into Unreal. I know for sure that it’s possible to do in Houdini, the tricky part will be to do it in a way that allow unreal to read it. I will also try using cascade and moving the particle system along a spline that’s modelled in the shape of a dome.

Thanks for the input everyone!