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FireFleckStudioOP•

This video was made in Dreams, the creation tool for PS4/PS5

In the video there is a boned/jointed tentacle object and an animated pendulum swinging cube. The end most part of the tentacle is programmed to follow a tag on the face of the cube, this creates some floppy free form animation!

I'm wondering if there's a term used for this technique or something similar?

Thank you!

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GastricSparrow•

I believe the floppy part, if that’s what you mean, would be called soft body simulation.

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FireFleckStudioOP•

Ok I see, I meant more the 'animation by way of following something'. If the tentacle/floppy bit weren't programmed to follow the cube, it would hang limp.

After reading a reply I got in the animation sub, I think I might have been over complicating the concept of 'Look At/Aim' or a Parent/Child system. As I said to that poster, it's easy to do something small and make something come to life!

Thanks for the reply, knowing the right terms really helps in learning!

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Shade_M8•

In Blender that would be called a “track-to” constraint. I’m not sure what it may be called in the program you used but perhaps it’s using a function of a similar name

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FireFleckStudioOP•

Ok that makes sense, there are 'Look At Rotators' in Dreams that I believe serve that same purpose. This is sort of mimicking that I suppose!

There might not be a name for what I have in mind, then again there might not need to be. Animating a soft bodied rig(?) to bounce around with a bit of freedom to be affected by forces with some kind of 'Look At' conditions holding it up, that is.

I think I've just made that 'Look At/Aim/Track To' condition out to be a bit more important than I should have.

Thanks for the reply!

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AGGHopper•

Procedural animation. The movement is simulated in realtime, but there are still constraints in the way it should move (like a static animation)

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FireFleckStudioOP•

Thank you!

So would you say the tentacle is being 'procedurally animated' in the sense that it can jump around freely but only to the limits that the followers constraints allow? I really felt like there might be more going on here!

(Psst. I've actually learned quite a bit about the topic since I'd posted this and have a post about physical animation in Dreams in the works. Keep an eye out!)

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AGGHopper•

A good example for procedural animations are puppets in dreams. I don't know 100% how they work, but on the luxus puppet you can see that the legs will move depending on the ground. They move where they need to be in order not to hover in the air. I believe a raycast is used for this.

  1. Raycast shoots ray from the upper leg joint to the ground.
  2. The position where it hit is stored.
  3. The base animation for the legs is changed to feature the position. This is what I would call "indirect procedural animation", because the condition or value is not set by the developer, but is changed according to a system.

The same goes for tentacles, but instead of using a ray, you directly manipulate the location it should move to. I would call this "direct procedural animation".

Both are procedural, because the final position of the radical (leg, tentacle) is determined during runtime and is not (only) hardcoded or read from a file.

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FireFleckStudioOP•

That makes sense, it is able to change the level and position of its feet on any given bumpy terrain probably using a laser to determine where. Thanks for the terms, they really help me understand what I've got going on here.

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AGGHopper•

You are right with the lasers, as raycasts are similar to lasers. Both could be described by using a vector.

You have good questions!

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