The Fish School System V2 is a complete rebuild of the popular "Fish School System" using Unreal Engines new Niagara particle system.
No longer animated through splines, the new school system operates completely using Niagara A.I.
Operating at roughly 10 times the efficiency. You are no longer limited to hundreds of fish, but can place thousands within your levels!
Moreover, there are two additional packages of Fish available that support this system!
See the Fish for School System & Fish For School System 2 packages!
The school A.I includes object avoidance, player avoidance, dynamic speed, and can be instructed to stay within an area by designating a bounding box. Additionally, the latest update provides collision for the fishes, which is perfect for aquariums and tanks. Adjust the size, speed, color, and an abundance of school behavioral settings within the blueprint! Automatically animate your fish Static Meshes with the new Auto-Animation feature! You no longer need to vertex animate your models in external applications! Vertex Animation option is still included if you wish to use custom animations for creatures that are not traditional fish.
The package also includes a spline blueprint which tells the A.I to swim along the created spline. This spline bluerint simply animates a target along the spline for the A.I school to follow, so it still includes object avoidance and player avoidance options.
UPDATE: Full Collision Support Added!
This update finally features the ability to stop your fish from swimming past invisible or visible boundaries, such as large aquarium tank glass (as seen in the demo). Unfortunately Niagara still cannot operate with custom collision channels, so I have set the collision channel to the "Destructible" profile. Simply make sure your bounding box or collision mesh has the "Destructible" channel enabled, and make sure it is thick enough (more than 10cm) and it will not allow the fish to pass through.
Shallow Water - Important Notes:
The shallow water feature allows the fish to initially swim horizontally without travelling vertically, which is great for shallow waters. However, this feature has strong limitation: It must not have slanted collisions within the path of the particle - otherwise the bounce trajectory of the particle will not remain horizontal. This package is not primarily designed for small or shallow waters, but is more focused on larger areas of play.
Technical Details
Features:
- Fish School A.I Blueprint
- Fish School A.I Blueprint with Vertex Animation
- Fish School Spline Blueprint
- Fish School Spline Blueprint with Vertex Animation
- Fish School A.I Niagara System
- Fish School A.I Niagara System with Vertex Animation
- Fish School Spline Niagara System
- Fish School Spline Niagara System with Vertex Animation
- Blueprints allow adjustment of Scale, Color, Animation Speed, Animation frequency, Toggle Auto-Animation or Vertex Animation, Toggle standard speed or Dynamic Speed, Minimum and Maximum Speeds & Animation Speeds, Number of Fish, numerous Particle School Settings, School Enumeration Presets, Custom object to Swim away from & Swimming Area Box.
- Fish Material with Changable colors & Patterns controlled by Particle Color
- High Poly Fish Static Mesh, Low Poly Fish Particle Static Mesh & Vertex Animated Fish Static Mesh
- Caustic Lighting Light Function Material
- Swimming Spectator Player Pawn
Number of Static Meshes: 3 (1 fish with 3 static mesh types)
LODS: 3
Vertices: 721 for Highpoly Fish, 334 for lowpoly Fish
Number of Blueprints: 4
Input: Keyboard, Mouse
Network Replicated: Assumably no, but currently unknown
Supported Development Platforms: Windows, Mac
Documentation: Hover over Variables for documentation on what they do