school of fish
For "The Last Shanty" I have created various Stylised VFX to make the environment feel alive and interactive
one of them being a School of Fish and Procedural animations.
School Of Fish and Animations
Fish Animation MM
For the school of fish and the shark animations I have created a procedural shader which uses a sine wave to animation the fish in the direction it is using. It also speeds up the animations based on the speed of a fish
School of Fish Niagara System
School Of Fish NS
To create this Niagara system I started of with creating 3 points in world space which the fish would be attracted too. Each point has a different attraction force this makes it harder for the fish to decide where to be attracted exactly. To get an alternating feel I make those values effected by a sine wave so it would go from Negative to Positive values which gave an alternating feel between each point, combining that with the procedural animation helped me boost the effect.
Lastly I made the fish swim away from any distance field, because we have sharks swimming around the fish and fish are scared of sharks I wanted to make this addition to make it more realistic. Using distance fields I am able to push away fish from the shark as if it is a magnetic field which sells the school of fish even more.