UnrealEngine5 Nanite Skeletal Mesh Animation via GPU Instanced Static Meshed Flip-book GAMEDEVMICAH
Hello, This is @GamedevMicah Berninghausen and I was asked to compile a quick review and tutorial on how to render massive amounts of instanced Actors (ISM) in Unreal Engine 5.2 in my Indie Video Game @RoadlessTheGame and also a TBA Superhero Battle Game both made in UE5 with Nanite, Lumen and Chaos Physics.
I am a full time Solodev indiegamedev, Father of 2 young boys... I am sorry I can only put 4.. omg 6 hours into cleaning up these blueprints and recording this video! I hope it is useful! Please ping me on Twitter at @gamedevmicah any questions or improvements you care to share!
I am also on reddit and have posted the detailed blueprint 4k screenshots on both twitter @gamdevmicah and reddit at:
/ density_i_have_baked_out_15_static_meshes_...
We use the In-Game "Save to Static Mesh" button within your Animation Preview Screen to save out 16 Key Frames of a walk animation for our AI. We then rotate "set mesh" every X amount of game second to flipbook through thoes static mesh baked frames to animate walking. Lots of downsides to this simplifications, and lots of upsides.
When a player is within range "get overlap instances sphere" is called to obtain transforms, and then delete instances. An AI Pawn is then spawned at that transform. Every so often that AI sees if any players are within a activation distance, if no, it deletes itself and adds an instance back to the marching flipbook ISM. Life cycles on.
This is a bit if a Celebratory Video, I don't need to explain it. @TimSweeney is now following me on Twitter, the CEO of Epic Games! He said "This Looks Amazing!" to this (twitter.com/GamedevMicah/status/1578892270677688320?s=20) twitter post, I am working on Epic Grant Submissions this weekend!!! This is my break from that! Cheers
Micah