Hi I'm trying to recreate the kelp stalks from Abzu, and I'm trying to figure out if Obi Rope is a good solution.
Video of the Abzu kelp forest
I'm not looking to have as many kelp as they do, maybe between 10-20, but I'm looking to emulate the visuals and behavior of the kelp as closely as possible.
Here is what I'm hoping to achieve:
- Grow and shrink the kelp dynamically
- Kelp stalks swaying
- Leafs being pulled around by the stalks
- Have 'current' forces that push kelp stalks and leafs around
Note that I don't need the kelp to be pushed around by the player or other moving objects, but I wouldn't mind it either.
Does that seem feasible with Obi Rope?
(08-04-2018, 02:02 AM)gentlemango Wrote: [ -> ]Hi I'm trying to recreate the kelp stalks from Abzu, and I'm trying to figure out if Obi Rope is a good solution.
Video of the Abzu kelp forest
I'm not looking to have as many kelp as they do, maybe between 10-20, but I'm looking to emulate the visuals and behavior of the kelp as closely as possible.
Here is what I'm hoping to achieve:- Grow and shrink the kelp dynamically
- Kelp stalks swaying
- Leafs being pulled around by the stalks
- Have 'current' forces that push kelp stalks and leafs around
Note that I don't need the kelp to be pushed around by the player or other moving objects, but I wouldn't mind it either.
Does that seem feasible with Obi Rope?
imho ObiRope not a good tool to simulate this, for various reasons:
- Ropes do not model torsion, so controlling the motion of leaves attached to them is pretty much imposible.
- Rope mesh geometry is recalculated every frame. This is unnecessary in your case as the kelp does not deform a lot.
- Ropes are meant for accurate collision detection, two-way rigidbody coupling, etc. Kelp in the video you sent is pretty much passive: it just gets out of the way of the diver, when it gets too close. Its dynamics could be easily implemented in a vertex shader (which would also be a much more performant solution). The swaying could be a implemented as simple sin() function, or more complex ones depending on what you need.
I strongly encourage you to use a simpler, shader-based custom solution to deform a static mesh. This is also probably the way the kelp in the video was done.