Hi today I bring my experience creating Virtual Animated Textures for decorative animals and implementation with character limited interaction.
I started this journey trying to use bones animations for decorative animals, soon I found that the best way of doing it was trought VAT, I follow this two tutorials
and
and after a series of trial and error I finally managed to arrive to an acceptable result.
This first picture is the setup of my niagara emitter with the costume scratch pad for animation from the first tutorial this is simply setting up a loop on the required amount of frames connected to the Material, as you can see here I added a Point Atraction Force for tracking the position of the player, this position is updated in real-time in the Blueprint
This is the costume Scratch Pad for Animation
This is how my BP looks to send the location of the player to Niagara.
Finally this is how the Material looks after using the provided BP by Trash Praxis
And this is the final result
If you have any questions or suggestions please let me know