Modifying Static Mesh to use Morph Targets (like ABZU)

[AmbiguousInt]

@MostHost_LA

First of, material shaders already allow for most of what he was showcasing with the fish swim cycle.

Morph targets and vertex shader are very similar/they do the same thing differently.

Second of, you dont need a skeletal mesh to have morph targets since a few versions ago. If you import as a skeletal mesh you do get your morphs without bones.
that’s what you want. The name of the mesh doesn’t need to be “static” to get all the benefits of not having to animate the bones of 1000 fish as described in the video above.
-unfortunately this does create a useless empty skeleton. Apparently though this doeant matter if you use 3dsmax.

you can check static mesh morph targets in the docs for the 3dismax script to do this, and the nodes to manipulate it in the material.

Having a quick look at the 3dsmax code. This works by packing the morph target data into the vertex color channels (so on a static mesh you have limited morphs).
The help button text explains this rather well.

While it sounds like a nightmare, I’ll give some serious though about porting this to blender…

The hard part and the most interesting part to me is when he talks about schooling and the idea of adjusting the memory position of each fish so they can look up each other faster. That’s all levels of nice/crazy. And probably something you really need to modify the engine for…

Yeah I’m aware of the material shader stuff, also packing the vertex animation with the 3DMAx script but I do not use 3DMax, as well as I just feel like its dated in general. The skeletal mesh route is not optimal due to the fact you’d still be rendering non-instanced which mean you’d have be allowed only so many. That is probably the key thing you’d be looking for in all this.