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  • How to animate a wave-like effect

Hi everyone,

I'm currently animating a character that has a large cape. I want to create the effect of a cape blowing in the wind, causing the cape to move in a wave-like manner. (see example)

I have tried several options now. Like animating it by hand with bones, or by animating bones by using a path with a path constraint. I feel i'm getting the best results with the new path constraint option, but i'm simply not there yet. Has someone already tackled this problem?

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If I do this I would make several bones all along the texture, mesh it and set weights. After this set key frames manually and at the end try to fix little shortcomings.

Wedrownik ha scritto

If I do this I would make several bones all along the texture, mesh it and set weights. After this set key frames manually and at the end try to fix little shortcomings.

I checked out the tank example that came with spine which showed a caterpillar track running along a path. Some pretty cool stuff. So i'm looking for a similar way to do this with the wave effect. The main difference here is that the cape needs to stay in place, and the path should move. At the moment i'm trying to animate the path but it is still difficult to get the wave effect going.


It took some time but i've managed to animate the cape of my character. Here's a GIF showing the result. I meshed the cape, gave it 10 bones. Put a path with a path constraint on it and animated the path handles by hand. I'm still looking for a better workflow but at least now it looks like cloth.

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Mike Moon ha scritto
Wedrownik ha scritto

If I do this I would make several bones all along the texture, mesh it and set weights. After this set key frames manually and at the end try to fix little shortcomings.

I checked out the tank example that came with spine which showed a caterpillar track running along a path. Some pretty cool stuff. So i'm looking for a similar way to do this with the wave effect. The main difference here is that the cape needs to stay in place, and the path should move. At the moment i'm trying to animate the path but it is still difficult to get the wave effect going.


It took some time but i've managed to animate the cape of my character. Here's a GIF showing the result. I meshed the cape, gave it 10 bones. Put a path with a path constraint on it and animated the path handles by hand. I'm still looking for a better workflow but at least now it looks like cloth.

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Nice cape! I'm trying to utilize the whole path constraint thing for the tail of my ghost character, and managed to get things set up and working with a about 9 bones, bound with a path constraint, which was in turn weighted to an IK arm setup, like in the Stretchyman video (

I've been unable to replicate a functional version of this setup, everything appears to be set the same, but the bones aren't moving with the path when it is transformed.

I'm hoping I just missed some small detail that ties the whole process together.

beauFORTRESS ha scritto

Nice cape! I'm trying to utilize the whole path constraint thing for the tail of my ghost character, and managed to get things set up and working with a about 9 bones, bound with a path constraint, which was in turn weighted to an IK arm setup, like in the Stretchyman video (Spine 3.4 paths sample projects walkthrough - YouTube).

I've been unable to replicate a functional version of this setup, everything appears to be set the same, but the bones aren't moving with the path when it is transformed.

I'm hoping I just missed some small detail that ties the whole process together.

At some point i had a similar problem. It was caused when i made a path constraint while having the wrong bone(s) selected i think. It was fixed when i selected the whole chain of bones and then created the path constraint.

wait how did you do that effect for the sword??? its really cool

For a cape I'm not sure a path is necessary, you could also just animate the cape bones' rotation. If you select the whole chain of bones and rotate, you get a sort of "additive rotation" which is about right for a cape.

The coolest thing to do is to have the cape bones driven by physics bodies, so your cape animates automatically depending on how the character moves. This can take a lot of tweaking to prevent the physics from exploding and making the cape fly around unrealistically.

beauFORTRESS, start a thread about what is wrong, post a project file, and we can try to help.

I had problems trying to apply a wave-like localized effect on a loop atop another moving path.

E.g. a waving snake which follows a path to do u-turns and so-on.

The first being that keeping the waving motion looping was very hard - I had to procedurally generate points for my wave spline, then hand-add them to the .json file. Secondly, making all of the motion local space motion, while still having the underlying body follow a spline didn't blend well - when animations transitioned from one to the other, I couldn't transition from one path to another without snapping, which required full blending off the current path, then blending on to the next.

Finally, a lot of my game was involving the snake folllowing an electrical cable or wire - and I couldn't figure out a nice way to provide that cable or wire to the Spine object via Unity.

No doubt these are probably solvable, but it was challenging and I had to give up on it for now. I even hired a college student to focus on the problem and he melted and disappeared.

I don't want to bitch about old "OMG, Spine doesn't have THIS??" whining episodes... but I still think implementing some kind of physics in the editor would solve all these problems at animating hair and cloth... :p

That said, I also understand you guys have limited manpower and need to set priorities in the development. But it's so pretty to dream... 😃

Xelnath, that sounds like an interesting problem. I'd have to give it a whirl (and likely run into the problems you described) to really be able to comment.

Abelius, I agree 100%. I think some simple physics would be extremely useful for secondary motion. It's in the plans!

Nate ha scritto

Abelius, I agree 100%. I think some simple physics would be extremely useful for secondary motion. It's in the plans!

:party:

Oh... didn't know that. Around six months ago, when I asked that, it wasn't the case. Great news then!

That and masking on the horizon makes me a very happy man, indeed. :p

Great idea would be add particles option like this in the Unity. To create some smoke or sparks user didnt have to create 100 bones with textures but only one with working particles 🙂
Mostly I am doing waving effect using several bones and weights. Then "pose" tool and at the end some manual moves.