Butterfly wings flap materials (Help!)

Hi, This is my first post here. I am student studying Games Art and interest doing 3D Game Effect.

I am studying particle effect in UE4, and I am trying to do a butterfly particle effect by myself. I bought the “Insect Birds and Fish FX” on the UE4 market place and try to make something similar but the mesh is not acting the same way as I expected.

*Problem:
The wings should perform up and down at the same time but not incline either left or right.

What I am thinking is because the mesh of two wings are combined as a single mesh and the pivot point is at the center of the single mesh so it just rotates either left or right? I tried to set not to combine meshes in the import mesh setting still not fix.

Here’s the nodes:

Anyone knows the reason plz help!

The wings need to have different rotation matrices (or at least the angle by which they are rotated needs to account for the transform point relative to the wing).
I created these in the desmos calculator.

Single Angle: cos(x+time);
flapping_wings_incorrect

Separate Angles: cos(abs(x)-t);
flapping_wings

Locked Sim: ( a * ( cos(abs( x ) - t ) - ( cos( abs( x ) + t ) ) ); // a == amplitude == 0.5
flapping_wings_locked

7 Likes

I like your idea. And i want to add another variation.
y= cos(abs(x)-t) - cos(t)
Motion

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Hi Kidman_Lee,

If it’s one mesh, then that is probably it, it’s rotating all the verts relative to the same point. Maybe what you could do, is mask each wing, and then apply one rotation to the left wing, and the mirrored rotation to the right wing.

Hope it works!

While I do think Overkill is underrated, sometimes you don’t need to jump directly to maximum complexity. Afterall, this is just a butterfly and their wing pattern is pretty straightforward. One vertex color and a sinewave straightforward.
Flappersetup

9 Likes

Thank you! The graph you showing make sense to me.

Thx for the advise! I will try. Gonna make it until it works

omg that’s way more easier than the one I make! Thx for providing another way of doing this effect.

Hi, I try to use the way you did but doesn’t come out the same result.Butterfly Problem

Wild guess is that you haven’t painted the outer verts with the red vertex color and the inner with black, but without any more info there’s nothing I can do.

Yes, you are right, It works after I paint it.Thank you.