Cascade: Instancing Skeletal Meshes Possible?

[Forgetful]

This flower is supposed to be instanced all over the level so I don't want it to get too resource intensive.

[mathes]

I don't believe it's possible, at least I haven't found a way to do it yet. You can use WorldPositionOffset with the material to add some minor movements, but nothing complex.

I haven't tried it, but perhaps with some fancy vertex painting combined with WPO, WorldNormal, and dynamic parameters you'd be able to simulate a small curving of the leaf within cascade.

[Forgetful]

It's that it's not working because the version with the skeletal mesh has never worked. The particle module "Mesh Data" will only load static meshes. I am wondering if there is a work around to use skeletal meshes.

[JohNLA]

That sounds really cool what you are doing. Best of luck getting it working. Like PaintFX for UDK
My guess since you had it working and then it stopped would be that your package is not being saved or fully loaded.

[Forgetful]

Hi fellas. I'm just in the process of making a flower that blooms in Maya and it doesn't look like my plan is going to work.

Original Plan

1) Create blossom, bud leaves (leaves that encapsulate bud), and stem leaves as separate meshes

2) Vertex animate each mesh using non-linear modifiers (bend, squash etc)

3) Import all materials, meshes and animations

4) Create a 3 part particle system that instances each of the three mesh types

-The first particle system would instance 5 bud leaves and place them around the center pivot accordingly
-Second would instance about 20 petals in a blossom shape using curve distribution
-Third system would spawn the plant leaves.

*The particle system worked with static meshes when I tested it out.

After I finished animating the bud leaves I wanted to import them as a test to make sure I wasn't going to get any errors going forward. Upon my inspection of the import steps on the UDN I saw that vertex animations are deprecated and no long encouraged.

I didn't know anything about skeletal meshes two days ago, but I have spent the last couple of days doing non stop tutorials in Maya and I've now rigged and animated AND imported my bud leaves skeletal mesh into the UDK. The animation looked just as it did in Maya so I was happy.

I felt good, I felt like things were right on track... that was until I went to go recreate my particle system in Cascade this morning. No matter what I seem to do I can't get the mesh type data to point to my bud leaf skeletal mesh for instancing.

It may seem odd, but the reason I wanted to use a particle system was so that I could take advantage of the curves and various randomizing features. This way I could have 3 flower models total, but swap out their parts on the fly for some nice variation.


Is there a better way to do this fellas? Am I just perhaps missing a check box?