My project is set onboard a 17th century Pirate Ship (mostly inside) so I am trying to create a ship “rolling” effect and was wondering about the best approach (thinking I may need a mixture of approaches). The following are some examples.
-
These ropes would be swaying in the direction of the arrows. My current proof of concept idea was to use a blueprint with a static mesh that would, upon level load/stream, would start a blueprint loop of increasing the rotation (roll) by a little with a delay of X per loop.
- This means the same blueprint can be used for multiple ‘rigid’ meshes like these ropes, a hanging lantern or a swinging body, all swinging (with a 0.X Delay offset) in relative harmony.
-
This could be achieved better with a Timeline and lerping the rotation I believe, I didn’t know how to do that at the time I was testing this.
-
Project wise, there are currently 16 instances of this “Rolling” BP on the top deck so far and I haven’t begun to include lanterns or other potential items and will run into similar numbers on the other 3 decks, give or take.
This is where the real issue is. Aiming for a little realism, there are 26 hammocks in this room. The hammock setup requires 2 kinds of sway, the obvious direction side to side (the blue ones in the background) is simple and could be done with the BP idea stated above but the ones facing the direction of the red arrows have to sway back and forth.
I can rig and animate this (along with any other non rigid mesh I might need) but would 26 skeletal actors like this be an issue or is there a neater way?
Would it be better to just rig a skeleton mesh to have animations swaying in both directions or split it into both static mesh rollers and skele mesh?
Example of the red arrow sway animation. It is very subtle in this particular case but the lower hammock is slightly further along one axis on the peak of the ship roll (and should be a little higher but this was just a quick proof of concept testing).
In this case the water is a static mesh plane that I also use the rolling effect over a delay. It is very large static mesh plane for obvious reasons, I just don’t know if this is a good or bad way to do it.