What effect technology should I use for achieve this effect?

General Discussion
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#1

I’m planning to generate island generate effect in unreal engine.

The Idea is apparence like this.

ezgif-4-7bb86a4b63

This is one of the grass in island.

This is created in blender with bone animation.

But What i creating is mobile game so, I think performance management is necessary and
I found some techniques and before I tried those things, I want to know performance difference.

The technique what I found is

    1. Alembic
    1. Vertex animation texture
    1. skeletal mesh animation
    1. morph target(?)
    1. pivot painter

There’s so many way to achieve this effect but I really can’t choose which one is best for my cases.

On my cases,
I’m making android game. which requires performance optimization
And Animating object is I guess 15 ~ 30 objects in one actor and maybe this actor will keep spawning and destroy on time elapsed.

Skeletal mesh animation is one of the easiest way to develop for this effect but performance what I’ve tested is so terrible.

few of the skeletal mesh is causing significally decreasing performance.

So what I think is vertex animation texture is looks good but I’m stucked texture size limitation which reason by mobile platform budget.

(Or If i can mesure of the result size, I will choose vertex animation texture because looks good performance)

And pivot painter is I don’t really have any knowledge and idea for that technology.

And I don’t really know about alembic’s performance.

If anyone can advice me please.

[I’m not good at english, so sentence might weird]

#2

VAT texture space can be an issue, but presumably this grass is used a lot, so you’ll probably get quite far with that one texture.
Also if your movements are only rigid (which they probably are since you animated it with bones) you can lower the animation texels and rely on sample interpolation, which will be done either way, to get more out of a lower texture size.

Pivot painter is nice, but requires a complicated shader for the movement you’re showing, so I wouldn’t recommend it on mobile.

#3

That grass is just represent for island’s object. there’s rock tree and else,

which software is great for generate vertex animation texture?

I have experience of using houdini but I have no license for that…

And I’ve found the way to generate vat in unreal engine plugin called AnimToTexture

My most favorite software is blender but there’s no support generate this effect.

There’s so many question on this reply sorry. I’m very confusing to choosing all those things.

#4

Houdini is easiest, but yeah, rather expensive.
I haven’t tried AnimToTexture plugin yet, but it’s probably worth giving it a go.
You might also find Blender Python scripts online. If you can’t find it, a VAT is essentially just a list of vertices for every frame, so you could try and build it yourself or ask a programmer/ta to build it for you.

#5

I’m decided to choose VAT for making whole environment effect.

Thanks your reply.

And Your effects are looks so amazing! I wish become effect artist like you!