It's a pretty deep rabbit hole too. I remember reading about the Uncharted 4 chickens being animated similarly, but storing the vertex positions over time in a texture.

It's all vertex color :)

Wanted to try out to mimic the Mario Galaxy method seen in this video (at timestamp).

It nails a specific "feel" of the water, with the small ripples, I don't see in many other games.

youtu.be/8rCRsOLiO7k?...

A surprisingly efficient way to give a lot of personality to each different critter is to add a bit of perlin noise to the movement. Makes it all feel very natural.

Higher noise frequency -> more hectic
Higher noise strength -> more erratic

Here's a comparison of different settings:

Would love to work on it again though!

Wanted to make something simple on Game Maker, but things easily get out of hand even with a closed system like this.

I find it hard to organize a clean library of game features and keep track of everything. I wonder how people do it on big projects ):

The "animation" is just a set of sines on XYZ position, rotation and scale. You can honestly do pretty much everything you want with the right pivots.

The sound is the cherry on top that ties everything together, kudos to the incredible sound people of Toca.

And with some very creative UV mapping, It also works wonders with little insects and other critters!

V axis is strength and U is an offset of the sine motion. Some examples of mappings for different fishes:

For the 1st fish, you want the head of the fish to stay steady (uv 1,0) and the rest of the body to progressively lag behind until the tail which moves a lot (uv 0,1)

Hope that makes sense 🙈

Based on the fishes in ABZU, the animation is a set of sines motions and extrusions. It uses the UVs to preset an intensity and offset of the motion (see next post).

It's surprisingly versatile and convincing! On top of being super cheap to make and run :)

Best trick I learnt is: You can achieve the shaded side of the cloud by comparing the sun direction and the tangent of the skybox hemisphere, then using it to slightly offset a "shaded" copy of the clouds.

Particularly visible here, with also a bit of fake cloud transparency :)

The clouds are just a layered bubbly noise, mapped on a hemisphere with super stretched uvs (more visible at the end of the video).

Does a great job of giving a sense of the clouds going over the horizon.