So I’ve been obsessed with flying squirrels lately and decided that I’d like to make a game based on them, involving an open world environment and some quirky AI that tries to chase you. Most of the assets should be fairly easy to model. I’m not going for realism - think more along the lines of Goat Simulator. Likewise, I’m not doing anything very code-intensive, because the game is more about the concept of being a flying squirrel.
This all goes to say that the only place I’m going to have a problem is in animating the flying squirrel. Somehow I need do some magic with cloth simulation to make it look like the squirrel’s “wings” (the pieces of flesh that connect their front/back legs and allow them to glide) are flapping in the wind.
I’m making my models in Blender, and they do have a cloth simulation algorithm, so I could try to figure out a way to apply the simulation in Blender with a wind tunnel or something and record the animation there, and have it loop while the player is flying in Unity. My other problem is that in order for this to look realistic, the limbs of the squirrel are going to have to move around a bit as the “wings” bend and flex.
I’m trying to avoid any simulations in real time because I want to devote more of the energy towards rendering plants (If this ever actually becomes a game, you’ll understand.)
I’m posting this in the animation category because I couldn’t think of any other categories into which it would fit, and I’m new to Unity’s animation system. Any advice will be greatly appreciated but do be prepared for me to ask a stupid question afterwards.
Seems from looking at several slow motion references of this on youtube (one of many http://youtu.be/1-FHzf4xnWw )
there is very little (read = none) cloth simulation needed. I didn’t see any cloth like flapping from the squirrels membrane between there legs.
I think this could be accomplished successfully by forgetting about cloth sim and setting up a couple (3-5) bone hierarchies between the front and rear legs. Then just animate them subtly fluttering. It would almost look like a set of ribs between the feet. 3-5 simple 2-3 bone chains.
Again the references actually show the squirrel moving his own legs on purpose - reacting to wind drafts and angle of decent, instead of the ‘wings’ causing the legs to move as you described. This is drastically different and attention needs to be paid to where the force is coming from, in this case it appears it is coming from the squirrels muscles rather than the wind blowing the squirrels legs around.
A simple setup that could work in Unity is to have a blend tree with 4 animations in it, one for each limb - moving up/down. Depending upon how the squirrel ‘controls’ its decent and how that translates to a controller or mouse would be how to set it up. Assuming the squirrel raises his legs up to allow for less drag, more drop, and assuming we are using a controller each trigger could be a limb and if you push down on one button that limb could raise/lower to effect the flight path / trajectory of the critter.
Thanks, this helps a ton. Not sure why I never thought about using a couple of bones spaced across the “wings” to simulate a tiny bit of undulation. As for the idea of manipulating the legs based on the direction/speed of the squirrel and the input of the player, I think I can make it work - I will need to touch up on my Mecanim skills though.
One addition you could add to the end node is a very subtle noise animation (modifier/controller) applied to a list controller that is blended with the position of the actual end bone. This would allow for actual physical control of the bone while still having a very subtle procedural noise (1 direction up/down) to sim the tiny wind that effects the very tip/edge of the membrane.
Sorry - I’m a Max artist so you will need to translate noise controller and a list controller into Blender lingo.
