Animating a sail for a boat - Blender or Unity?

Hi, I’m modeling a sailboat and I’m facing an issue with the sail.
As I will animate the sail to reproduce the wind effect, I have several options that maybe you can help me to choose:

- Make the sail in unity and use the cloth texture to animate the sail with the wind zone
- Make the sail on blender and create 3 basic wind animations (slow, middle and strong wind), and affiliate them depending on the wind zone on unity
- Make the sail on blender and use the native cloth and wind fonctionality and find a way to implement them on unity

That’s it, thanks for your advices

 

I suggest option 2.
This is an example of animated sails wich used blended vertex animation clips (except i use 3ds max for simulation )

 

Wow, this is really good and exactly what kind of result I'm looking for...

I followed your advice and tried to create the 3 animations, but instead of doing them by hand, I use a Wind Force.
The thing is, when I push play, the result is good, but I don't think I will be able to export that to unity...

This blended vertex animation clips, this is like blending some vertex with a perlin noise in order to reproduce some wind movement? Do you have some documentation about this technique?

I appreciate your help here, have a good day

 

Had the same exact issue you were facing, spent all day trying to figure it out. I simply exported the baked cloth animation sim out of Maya as an alembic cache, I'm sure you can do the same in Blender. Install the alembic package in unity via Window>Package Manager.

Unity has a tutorial for importing and playing back Alembic files here:

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.formats.alembic@1.0/manual/tutorial.html

I hope this helps

 

Hi,
I heard about the alembic but I've never tried it properly.
I really appreciate your feedback here, it helps a lot.

I don't have the time right to come back to it right now as I'm dealing with networking issue but I will come back when this will be done with some images !

Have a good day

 

if you will facing with Alembic`s performance and compatibility issues then pay attention to my package VAT for import vertex animations.

 

Amazing asset. So if I understand well, it allows to import baked animation? of any type? this is exactly what I'm looking for if Alembic doesn't fit my needs

 

Old thread but it's still interesting. Maybe for animation from Blender to Unity using shader and VAT like this example:
https://github.com/Gaxil/Unity-AlembicToVAT

Anyone know an addon to create VAT from Blender directly? Could be a time saver, like this for Unreal which I tested for Unity without good results:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/com...-vertex-animation-script-for-blender-3d-users

 

You can provide me with a test animation and I will show you the export result using VertexAnimationTools. It is also GPU accelerated however supports any materials.