Creating and morphing organic shapes - HELP

[Anonymous]

To do an architectural walkthrough through a utopian living house in Unreal Engine, I want to create organic windows in a facade which change their position throughout the game.

The way I approached it, was creating negatives with splines and shell modifier, substracting them from a box, chamfering the edges (with a bit of effort) and then copy, make the changes and apply a morpher Modifier to later export it to Unreal Engine.

The modifier simply couldn't do it. It didn't recognize the box any more and when I tried it again, adding the modifier earlier in the process, it simply stopped taking the changes at some point.

Any ideas how I can achieve this result, are there any other strategies you can think of to reach this goal?

[Francisco_Penaloza]

I don't think Unreal or any other real-time engine will take your morph modifier. I think you could try swapping geometry depending of player position.

[ads_royje · Accepted solution]

Hi jkt1995,

I am reading your workflow, I am not sure to read correctly, but I seem to understand that the shape you are try to set as a morph target has been heavily modified from the original one.

Morpher will accept any shape that has the same base object (editable mesh or editable poly) and that has the exact same amount of vertices.

Morpher will morph on a per vertex based, moving vertex by ID to their new position from the target model, if there is a single vertex more or less in the target, morpher won't pick it.

As suggested by Francisco, you may op to swap models in Unreal, using 2 different static meshes.

.

Morpher should be exportable in Unreal, I do think it'll have to be a skeletal mesh though, I don't think you can do with static meshes, and should be driven by a animation tree.

Using morphing in unreal, you could get to see it slowly morphing while in game, using static meshes, you would not see the morphing happening live.

Another approach would be to actually rig and skin the window, as a 'character', and use bones to alter the window shape. That may not be exactly what you are looking for, but would be an interesting alternative.

If you have the same amount of vertices in both meshes, the one with Morpher and the target, let me know. I may ask for the file to troubleshoot the issue..

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Thank you both for your support!

I was quite careful not to add/delete any vertices in my first approach,
but I think the geometry was simply too dirty, I don't know, it didn't work
anyhow.
The way I solved the issue was taking a different approach: I sweeped the
cut volumes and connected them to one surface - and then the program
accepted it, also Unreal Engine handled it wonderfully well.
Thanks a lot for your help!