First off, this place looks amazing! I’m hoping the community is as fantastic as the effects I’ve seen. I’m also hoping I have enough “street cred” to be a part of it. As I look around, most people are posting particle FX, so I’m not entirely confident of my work or its relevance here…but here goes nothing (it’s better than lurking). A few of my latest works, all abstract, twisted contraptions…
These animations are not synced to the music. I just happened to be listening to those tracks while I tweaked settings, so the results naturally fall inline with the music (somewhat). I’m not creating a music visualizer, it’s more of a motion graphics tool that I like to bend into weird and interesting ways (hence the name).
It’s still very alpha in its development. I’m more focused on building out animation features before I focus on materials and presentation. If you look closely at ‘abstract thingy’ you can see the orange table from the UE4 StarterContent.
It is not synced with the audio although the animation is driven by a looping perlin noise. Despite being random, the noise matches up occasionally with the beat when running at a similar play rate. The future of UE4 audio looks amazing. For now I’ll continue to fake-it-till-I-make-it. However, audio-driven animations are certainly on my TODO list.
Anything I create in Houdini feels trapped in an offline world. So I decided to build a procedural system in-editor based on ideas found in Maya Mash.
For the wave, I have 3 custom actor components:
I use a Linear Distribute component. Which is a fancy way of saying, give me a row of instanced static meshes. I probably have about 40 in this example.
I use a Replicator component. Which is a fancy way of saying give me a bunch of copies of the first component. So it takes that first row of 40 instances and duplicates it…say 40 times.
The last component is Noise. It’s used for animating the height of each instance. The noise waveform is slightly offset for each row, creating the undulating effect.
My plugin will come with a bunch of components that you can mix and match. All component properties should be adjustable in real-time, in-editor. My imgui test video demonstrates property changes on the Linear Distribute component.
Found some older videos of basic usage in editor. They demonstrate various distribution types available for laying out instanced static meshes. A distribution type is a starting point for an overall shape you’re tying to achieve.
Below is the spherical distribution type (the other types can be viewed from my profile page):
All my animated (abstract) videos started life using the linear distribution type. I think I’ve managed to get a lot of mileage out of this humble type, so and I’m excited to see where the more complex types take me.
If you’d like to see an actual tutorial video, let me know.
