Tail Animator - Procedural tail animation for tentacles, simple capes, squids and more!

Tail Animator is package with components which are animating bones
(also it can be just transforms) in smooth slithering style.

Lots of possibilities, few my ideas included in demo scene :wink:

Features:

  • Quick setup: Add component to start tail bone and hit play
  • Interactive demo scene
  • Works on all kinds of skeletons and on basic transforms
  • Many parameters helping fixing wrong rotations in bones
  • Full source code included with detailed commentary

> Asset Store Link <

There are coming up new cool features in next updates, stay tuned!

Release Video
Playing with parameters video
Support for fixing rotations video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl91tLuTkhY
Tutorial video with building flying tentacle monster using Tail Animator:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxxlZCrntoQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IjlwmWp5y4

Be sure to share your creations using this component. I would love to see it! :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Watching some of the animations in the second video (the ā€œperformance testā€ one), it seems that if one made an invisible tentacle, with only the last bone having a visible mesh, you might get a credible ā€œschool of fishā€ animation by moving the group the way you do. It might also work, and would have twice the fish for the same performance, to sneak in an extra fish object at a middle bone of each tentacle, or maybe 2/3 of the way down the chain.

This is the kind of asset that is going to absolutely glow with performance when the new Unity Job System and Entity Component System move to production readiness, if you make a version in that mode.

1 Like

Yeah thatā€™s cool idea, probably will make examples of this, also I have in mind making it with ECS.
There will be updates enhancing package with such things :slight_smile:

Bought! Iā€™m working on a game that just so happens to have capes, tails, and tentacles! The videos look quite impressive!

2 Likes

Whoa! Cool, hope youā€™ll find this package very useful :slight_smile:
Probably today I will submit update to version 1.1 (price will go up)
There will be examples for animating UI elements, 2D sprites, better inspector and school of fish example :wink:

@FimpossibleCreations , Iā€™ve run into a problem. I copied the cape from the demo scene to make a cape for my player character. When the character is falling and the cape flips straight-up in the air, it does a quick, 360 degree twist around the y axis. Could this be a rotation-related bug?

This only happens when ā€œuse wavingā€ is checked, but the waving axis is set to (1,0,0).

Can you PM me gif with it? Maybe I will need to reproduce it and check whatā€™s going on to fix it.

If someone had troubles with strangely rotated tail after adding component, solution is coming in version 1.1.1 (currently waiting for approval for 1.1.0)

There I explain why it was a case and demonstrating fixing feature:
THERE WAS VIDEO - NOT NEEDED ANYMORE

Just got this, looks perfect for my game ā€“ only to find the tail on my animal is on wrong axis, so very eagerly awaiting the fix!

Ough I just was sitting whole day and itā€™s after midnight in my country but I think Iā€™ve just made fix for all troubles with this rotations. Now I was truggling with blender specification which is talented to make things hard to solve, it was very challenging and hard to figure but now everything should look right event tail have strange roll rotations between bones :open_mouth: This thing will be in V1.1.2 (V.1.1.1 also will have some fixing functions but V1.1.2 will have it more universal)

New version is LIVE!
Suprisingly it automatically pop out version 1.1.2 ignoring 1.1.1 and some hotfixes :smile:

Here short video showing main new features:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvVxD36XPEU

Changelog (since V1.0.1):

  • Added new examples and components to animate transforms with tail animator in 2D space- UI and Sprites
  • Now you can put one transform to bones list and it will be root bone, so you can have component attached to much other object than tail bone
  • Custom inspector to see all parameters more clear
  • New example scenes
  • School of fish example scene
  • Added ā€œAutomaticā€ tuning option for fixing orientation axes automatically by default

Now I am working on tutorial video of making simple 3D model in blender and building tentacle monster out of it, pretty simple but there will be some useful tips.

You can check if this version will do job for you, there still can be something wrong, it depending on some modelling softwares specifications, export settings etc. I am not able right now to get from somewhere all kinds of this things to test, but this ones I checked now, which wasnā€™t working before now behaves correctly.

When I will have some less intense days I planning to set up my mind hard as hell and then try to make totally universal solution for this thing (donā€™t know yet if itā€™s possible, this kind of animation is using some logics which makes some things really hard to solve)

I found all assets of this publisher interesting, so I put them into my cart, total price was 12$, and then I checkout ā€¦ wtf the price went up from 12$ to 24$ @.@ What happened in the time I check some other assets lol?
Maybe today is not my lucky day. Letā€™s wait to Christmas madness sale lol.

Whoa unfortunately indeed (you made me sad man :open_mouth: ), today was day of rising prices, my current approach was to make my assets lower price at release days then bumping up after week.
Wishing youā€™ll be able check them out soon :wink:

The ECS thing sounds nice. Donā€™t forget you can now talk to animator in at a lower level if you need to as well.

Iā€™ve recorded small tutorial video of making simple model in blender then adding to it Tail Animator and building flying tentacle monster, check it out :slight_smile:

1 Like

What happened with the price? Yesterday I found this asset, thought itā€™d be cheap enough for toying around, although I donā€™t need it. I wanted to check your other assets out more and get this one today, but now itā€™s twice that amount. The introductory price didnā€™t even last a week. Thatā€™s sad, but too much for just toying around.

It would have been good if you would have stated how long the introduction sale was going on.

Please support 2D; Im doing an anime fighter and i need 2d whiskers, fur, tails, tree roots etcā€¦ ā€¦I saw a bit about 2d and I had my wallet out ready to buy but the video said to encourage the idea to make it a reality, add 2d and ill buy 2 :slight_smile:

Id use it with a puppet2d rig when rendering animated characters for spritesheet animations

Itā€™s supporting 2D since yesterday :wink:
Check v1.1 release video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvVxD36XPEU

I want admit that this is young feature, I would need some 2D ideas and assets to check if it always work as expected. (Iā€™m not experienced in Unityā€™s 2D)
If you buy feel free to pm/mail me, I will be happy to cooperate and even extend components for your needs, just need to know what crazy things do you want to archieve in 2D :wink:

got the update and set up Tail Animator Simple on my animalā€¦but now the tail is flattened. Any suggestions?

Does the animal have animator? TailAnimator_Simple is for not animated objects, Tail_Mecanim and Tail_MecanimBones are for animated ones (gonna make this things more clear in V1.2.0)

Now I am working on other solution for some math in algorithm for this component, making it more universal in terms of skeletons made in very different ways.
Also working on component which will skin static meshes easily inside unity and create skinned ones.

Edit:
In V1.2.1 ā€œFull Correctionā€ is doing the trick