Been messing some more with Mesh Modifiers and I’ve done a video to show some of the effects possible. It behaves like the Modifier system that can be found in max (and any other 3d software I imagine) so the user can have a stack of operations to produce an end result, the order can be changed as well etc.
Some of the 40+ supported deformations:
Bend
Bubble
Displace
FFD (2x2x2, 3x3x3, 4x4x4) (Lattice in Maya)
Hump
Melt
Morph
Noise
Path Deform
Push
Radial Skew
Relax
Ripple
Skew
Spherify
Stretch
Taper
Twist
Vertex Animation
Wave
XForm
Any number of modifiers can be applied to a mesh or skinned mesh and each can be turned off. Each modifier can have its own offset to alter the effect on the mesh. If no updates to a modifier takes place then it takes no CPU time which makes it quite handy for in game effects. The video above only shows a selection of the modifiers working, I will do a another video to show the FFD for example. Much more information can be found at http:www.west-racing.com/mf
Chris
It’s being done on the CPU at the moment, I could possibly do some shaders to recreate some of it on the GPU but it would reduce the functionality a bit, but it really doesn’t perform badly as is and once a deformation is set then no CPU time is needed, if it were done by shaders then it would be constantly doing the deformation. But yes it would be nice to have the choice.
Thinking about maybe making it stand alone system that could be sold I guess, comes down to how much time I get away from our main projects to support it all.
I have recreated all the modifiers in Unity so yes they can be applied to any mesh in the inspector like any other script, I also have the data being exported from Max (I don’t own Maya so have not done any of my systems for that but it’s something I might do if I ever get some spare time) directly to Unity so it is easier for the artist and saves them having to try an match it all up.
I’d definitely buy them, but only if they come with source code so I can roll my own modifiers, and gain zee knowledge from looking at the code! Otherwise its another blackbox
Thinking I might put the system up for sale but it’s very much a case of finding the time to support it etc.
And yes you can fully animate the path in the Path Deform modifier, actually I could expand that to use my Path Follow controller to allow any number of paths with weights. Depends if my artist shouts at me that he wants that functionality
Also planning on doing the world space warps and maybe the flex modifier, but I understand Unity 3 has soft bodies so probably should wait till I can upgrade to do that one.
Hats off to you SpookyCat!
Was hoping 3.0 would have something like this built in, but am glad people who know how to whip stuff like this up are out there.
I too would like to chime-in on the making it available sometime, somehow bandwagon.