Tentacle/fin physics for the animations?

moultano

One of the most beautiful things about the ocean is the way things move.



On land you can get away with the direction of movement having no effect on the model, unless there's a large amount of drapery or hair. In the ocean you can't. Every movement of every organism flows and sways responding to it's movement and the water around it.

Will subnautica capture this somehow? I wouldn't expect this necessarily to be all simulated online, but it occurred to me that even in pre-baked animations, a large amount of work could be saved by using a physical model rather than trying to capture all of this by hand.

SteveRock

Yeah, we'd like to do as much of this kind of thing procedurally as possible. We probably won't bake it, since that could take a lot of memory. We'll likely fake it with some simple procedural models. There's this thing, that runs in your browser: http://aleksandarrodic.com/p/jellyfish/

Racer1

In a round-about way, this reminds me of the "Darwin Pond" game. Lifeforms "evolve" from inefficient to more controlled locomotion. It would be interesting to see some variation of this in Subnautica. If the game were to randomly vary the attributes of various species over time (days not eons), it could make even the species in the game somewhat unique each time you play.

Zinkey

SteveRock wrote: »

Yeah, we'd like to do as much of this kind of thing procedurally as possible. We probably won't bake it, since that could take a lot of memory. We'll likely fake it with some simple procedural models. There's this thing, that runs in your browser: http://aleksandarrodic.com/p/jellyfish/

Good god that link is awesome.

IronHorse

Procedurally generated animations are the wave of the future..
Oh how i dreamt of skulk feet properly matching the intricate wall surfaces it stepped on.

Really excited to see this being implemented in a game where animation will count for a lot

Asraniel

That would be inverse kinematics ironhorse, its actually used in quite a few games now (but obviously much more costly cpu wise than normal animations)