Procedurl fish animation

Development Character & Animation
1

Hello,
I’m trying to add animation to fishes in my underwater game.
But I don’t really know where to start, as fishes can move in three axes I cannot get good animation with traditional techniques (a.k.a keyframed animation). It doesn’t look organic and the animals look out of place.

The solutions that I’m considering so far are:

  • Making a procedural animation system where a combination of sine function controls the movement of the bones. Like explained here http://ocean-rift.com/?p=170 and shown here:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pg4Oz_aCe1M

  • Make poses for each direction and use Aim Offset somehow to interpolate between the poses.
  • Make poses and use functions to interpolate between them in a more natural way, like in this plugin https://github.com/enlight/Skelly (Seems to be discontinued)

Thanks!

(Yay! this is my first post here! :D)
(Epic you are doing a great job and I’m enjoying my time with the engine)

2

Pose Animation has been on the UE4 roadmap for a while.
No ETA on when it will be available though.

You can always check out IK solutions based on the built-in FABRIK or something like IKinema.
Despite the difficultly I had with IKinema (when it first became available), there is a lot of potential there.
I intend to muck around with it more in future when I have the time :slight_smile: