Using a Smoke Sim as an animated character?

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hi Guys,
I was wondering if I could make a character out of smoke that I would be able to control. I was thinking a bounding box in the shape of my character and running and animating the bounding boxes with a tied smoke sim. Would that be possible? I’m coming from blender where that could be done but I can’t see how to do that in a realtime environment. Would it be to intensive to run at realtime anyways? Would there be a better way to get the same effect?

Thanks!

2

You can create a character BP and use a particle system instead of skeletal mesh as your character object. And if you want the smoke to be shaped like a humanoid or something, then put your skeletal mesh too inside the character BP, hide it’s mesh(or make its mesh a placeholder sphere or something simple) then attach smoke particles to the skeleton’s bones.

3

Thanks! I’ll try that out tomorrow.

4

You could either try this: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/ContentExamples/EffectsGallery/1_G/index.html

Or you can spawn and attach the particles to the bones in construction script of your character blueprint.

5

Hi again,
I haven’t had much success with attaching the smoke particles to the bones. Where would I reference the bones in the smoke simulator? Would there be a way to have the skeletal mesh as the bounding box for the emitter?

6

Rama in the forums made something like that in C++ some months ago but he is a crazy programmer so i dont think there is a way to do that via BP only unless you are good at C++ as well.

7

So you don’t think there would be a way to confine the particles to the mesh itself? Do you think I could reference the emitter in code and tell the particles to disappear once they exceed the bounds of the character or bounce off the inside of the mesh? I’ll try seeing what attaching the smoke to each bone looks like tomorrow though, thank you so much for helping me out!

8

do you think I could use CPU particles and have the hidden mesh collide with the particles so that the particles bounce around inside the hidden box of the character mesh? What would that look like?

Thanks!

9

That wouldnt work either. You could use a cylinder or sphere to spawn the particles inside Cascade but it wouldn’t be worth the trouble in my opinion.

10

Ok, thank you so much again for your advice. I’ll see what I can do.

11

can you give me the link to that please?

12

did you ever get this working?