I wanted to direct the Unreal developers’ attention to this video:
It shows a villain named Inque from the TV animated series Batman Beyond. You’ll notice there are special liquid motion movements that she uses, including rapid transformations, tentacle appendages with rapid arcing or sine-wave like motions, weapons, morphing in and out of her human form, scattering and splattering and the like.
With the GTX50** series of graphics cards around the corner, could liquid vertex animation become a serious pursuit for Unreal’s development team? The ability for fluid skeletal meshes to take different shapes without decline in performance?
You guys have developed Nanite for static meshes, and as of UE5.5, skeletal meshes… so it would seem to be the natural evolutionary course to produce a nanite for the animation & morph target systems as well. Just basically adjust resolution as needed to allow for whatever fluid deformations the designer wants.
The closest I’ve seen to something like this in 3D tech is ZBrush’s Sculptris technology… the use of dynamic tessellation to sculpt fluid motion in real time. But it has its limitations… it can only be used for modeling and not for animating anything in particular.
Brainstorming… could you guys implement something like this using flow maps as a flip book to control the deforming and animation of the vertices more tightly in real time? Or using Chaos physics constraints and impulses to force the geometry to move fluid-like in a particular direction, or to scatter and such… before reverting to a default ‘solid’ form again (like a MetaHuman)?
Just sort of brainstorming ways to make a process like this less tedious.
Anyways, I know the team at Epic Games likes a challenge. Would be very curious to see how they’d approach something like this!
(If this can already be done with present tools, my apologies in advance for lack of knowledge and foresight on the subject!)