Animated Mesh in particle system

Hi everybody,

I’ve got a question. I want to make some seagull flying around a monument so I decide to make a 3D model (just 2 planes, not something complicate ) with a simple animation.
But I didn’t find anything in the particle system where I can put my mesh with his animation controller.
i search on google and a lot of topic but there is no real answer.

Have you any idea how I can do this ?

To my knowledge, you can’t control actual skeletal animations through Cascade. However, you can either 1) bake out your animation to an animated vertex texture and drive that through a material in Cascade, or 2) you can set up some world position offset to get simple movement. For both methods, you would need to convert your mesh to a Static Mesh. If you want your seagull to face the direction their velocity is moving, you would need to set your mesh to be velocity aligned in your emitter settings in Cascade. You may need to reorient your mesh in your 3d program (should face +X if I’m not mistaken?)

Edit: I missed the ‘Unity’ tag on this, so ignore me talking about methods in Unreal. Sorry!

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Alright thanks for your answer ! I will go with the second solution looks better for what i want.
And in my studio we face our 3D mesh in +Z

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Hi @Neall, if you intend on using Unity (which is tagged I believe) you could use the new Visual Effects Graph and the built in Shader Graph support. You can use your mesh as an output and then use Shader Graph to create a vertex offset and make the wings flap.

Alternatively you could just create the Shader to flap the wings and then use a script to spawn and move the meshes if that was an easier approach for you?

Hi @jack_tilling thanks for the answer, i will check if it’s a good solution in the future project.
Actually i just made an animation path for the seagull and i’m switching between 2 animations clip ( Seagull Idle and Flap )
here is the result i have
2019-12-09_16-04-44

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Hey it’s me again, I have a problem, last time some of you suggest me to make a shader to create a wing flap it’s what I did for this time

but the result on the simple mesh and the mesh in the particle system haven’t the same result. and i have no clue why if someone have an idea i will really appreciate ! 2020-01-08_17-24-10

Hi. I had a similar problem. Try commenting out the next line in the shader code in all passes:
Screenshot_1

i don’t know what it is exactly in my shader, i tried to open it on text editor but didn’t find anything like that

Ok solution find if that can help, the vertex position was useless I just needed to multiply by 0 and append with the vertex color image

subtract world position from object position. that’s what i did in unreal when i created butterfly wings material.

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