I am a bit new with UE and I am still discovering things, hence my question: how can I use a skeletal mesh as a particle?
Basically what I try to achieve is a cloud of flying birds. My idea was to drive the birds as a whole with a particle system, but as far as I’ve seen it doesn’t seem possible to use animated / skeletal meshes as particles. I then tried to use a blueprint and to get the position of the particles and to reposition a set of birds at every frame with it, but I wasn’t able to understand how I can access to the individual particles information (date of birth, position, orientation…).
Which approach would you suggest? How can it be done in a blueprint?
It is not possible to use a skeletal mesh in a particle system, but you could do it like that:
-Do it with a basic AI:
-Do it with a mesh in your particle system -> therefore you will have to create a static mesh + a flipbook material to simulate the wings
You can find some examples in the landscape demo and the blueprint demo
The approach suggested by gives good results. I used a gradient map in the flipbook to do a position offset on the wings. With a smart grayscale texture the flapping of the wings is quite convincing.
For a more complex skeletal mesh some researches about a crowd behavior may very likely be more appropriated.
