I’m looking at making a 3d game that will include a lot of oozes in it, I’m a little curious about the best way to do the graphics for them. I’d like the oozes to wiggle around a bit as they move, a few will need to be able to combine themselves together as well. I’ve been holding off trying to find a good way to do the combining animations some of them will need, I’ve never tried an animation that requires two or more actors. Does anyone know how I should go about doing it?
The process of making the models for the oozes can vary quite a bit depending on what 3D software you have (if you have one, that is), same thing for animation. To make the model, you could try to sculpt it to get an organic look.
If you have Cinema 4D, you can use a wiggle deformer or a soft body on the ooze to have it wiggle as it walks, or you have some other 3D package, you can try rigging the character in a way that allows you to control the “blobs” on its body. Possibly even add an IK to the base of the ooze so that it would stick to the ground while you animate it, so that it would look a bit more sticky/gooey.
As for combining the oozes together, you could just make it so that you move both the oozes inside each other, delete the other one and scale the other one up a bit, making it look like it grew in the process. If the oozes have transparency, you could fade the other ooze out instead of deleting it to make the morphing process a bit more believable. This way you could avoid having to make the animation for the combination process.
You could use also Unity’s cloth physics, but make it more stiff.
I’m not actually 100% sure which way around it is, but I think it is slower to use cloth than animation with the deformation animated. Correct me if I’m wrong though.
It is slower, but not by much and effect is so much better. For example ooze can react to walls colliding with it.
Yeah, good point. It can actually be a lot easier to set up as well
Yup. And to create such thing (actually played with it in the past, trying to make 3D Gish remake, and it worked quite nice), basic ooze enemy, you don’t even need to model anything, Unity sphere with cloth simulation on is good enough.
Thank you Darkhog, that’s exactly the kind of tip I’m looking for. It might just add an extra bit of life to my little oozes. I have a whole host of 3d modeling tools but they’re all designed around animating rigid objects like people or tanks. I’ll toy with the cloth physics and see if I can create a floppy gelly ooze like object.
Just another thing, you can animate UVs as well. So you could have the texture going in a sort of down-flowing set up, and maybe have a shader doing some warping to the texture as well. This would help with the appearance of the ooze. As far as animating it, I’d say lots of bones. Unity’s animation system can handle translation and scaling of bones as well, so you can use some of that to good effect as well.
Hey i was bored and made a ooze model that you can use if you want
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0Bza8nbaMo4JFS1VrakRsSE9sVlE
Sorry for the delay, I took some time to do a bit more thorough research on creating jelly effects. It seems the new cloth modifier doesn’t work well for jelly like effects. I’ve heard I can use spring joints but it’s apparently pretty difficult to rig up complicated models with all of that.
Thank you both Kburkhart84 and da_st, your tips were helpful and the models cool.