Hi there!
I’m an animation student and a novice working with UE4, but for my final project I’d love to animate a whirlpool. I searched everywhere but I couldn’t find a decent tutorial, does anyone have an idea how I could do this?
Some references as to what I’d like to create:
[Youtube Video][2] (<- hyperlinked)
Any help is appreciated!
Well first you are going to have to have a material for the water. You could make one, or you could use one in the starter packs. If you want to make your own but don’t want to spend a lot of time on it than follow this tutorial. Unreal Engine 4: Materials tutorial - Creating quick and simple water - YouTube All though the water is very simple, it would make out good for what you are doing. If you have light shining at an angle on it than you will have nice shadows on the creases of the water that will make it look really good. Now for the actual shape of the water and the animations it actually won’t be very hard. All you have to do is take shapes and merge them together and animate them. If you need a tutorial on how to animate them here is one:Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial - Basic Moving Platform - YouTube In a 3D modeling software, (like blender) you are going to make a plane and cut a hole out of the middle of it, then, you can make some kind of cone shape and uvmap it so you can apply the material to it in Unreal. If you need a tutorial on how to uvmap a material in blender than click this link: Blender 2.7 UV Mapping 1 of 4 - YouTube In the engine you can use that tutorial on how to move objects and spin that cone around. If you want something like the pictures you had, you are going to have to animate the cone-shape-thing that I told you about above. You will have to have polygons going in and out everywhere, that is where it gets tricky, but anyone can do it.
Hope this helps!
Hi WastefulSword7
Thank you for the fast reply and the links, it’s super helpful!
I’m using Maya as my 3D modeling software and I’m pretty sure that I know what you mean with making a cone shape and animating it, I’m just not sure about having polygons going in and out everywhere. Do you think I could use a tornado tutorial and tweak the materials to water so it looks like a whirlpool? Tornado - YouTube
The tornado tutorial is pretty much exactly what I am talking about. Doing that will be really nice after applying that water material. If you are going to do something like that than I would blend the top of the tornado in with the base of the water and use it that way.
So far I’ve made this in Maya, but I’m not sure if it’s any good, it looks kinda weird.
Do you have any tips on how I can improve it?
That is really good. If you added foam going all over the place in it it would step it up a little bit.
