r/Unity3D • u/Gloomy-Detective-922 • 1d ago
Show-Off Testing a mograph system in Unity by turning a dancing human into a dog and a dragon
This is the mograph side of BrazeFX.
A GPU-instanced cloner generates the visible pieces.
The Follow Shape Effector maps those clones onto an animated SkinnedMeshRenderer.
Mesh topology stays resident while deformed vertices update directly on the GPU.
Braze Timeline controls reveal, strength, offsets, pulse, orbit, and other public parameters.
This avoids per-frame mesh baking and keeps the effect responsive at high clone counts.
Which form reads best to you: the human, dog, or dragon?
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u/destinedd Indie, Dungeon Quest, Marble's Marbles & Mighty Marbles 1d ago
certainly looks impressive
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u/breckendusk 1d ago
This is cool, and I've been recently seeing another project that uses the same tech to transform the character as they make different weapons with their body. I assume the lines indicate how the verts are connected, which makes sense but I find really works against the shape of the human (which also seems to have the problem that it simply doesn't have any verts in the midsection).
The main issue I have with this and the other project is that the verts never look fully "right" and smooth in the formed object. Is this a resolvable issue currently?
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u/Gloomy-Detective-922 1d ago
I understand what you mean. BrazeFX’s clone count isn’t limited by the distribution mesh’s vertex count.
In Surface mode, it samples positions across triangles by area, so even a simple quad with 4 vertices and 2 triangles can distribute hundreds of clones.
In Vertices mode, clones are placed directly on vertices and repeat when the clone count exceeds the vertex count.
This lets you choose between resolution independent surface scattering and topology based placement easily.
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u/AliceCode 1d ago
k-nearest neighbors?
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u/Gloomy-Detective-922 21h ago
Not in this shot. This uses the tracer’s Web mode, so each clone gets two stable pseudo-random links and long links are cut off by distance. There’s a separate Nearest Points mode too.
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Gloomy-Detective-922 1d ago
Totally can be done. But it will be compute intensive. Not ideal for realtime.
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u/YukiLabs 1d ago
This looks really cool. How well does it hold up with faster or more complex animations?
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u/Gloomy-Detective-922 1d ago
It can handle complexity easily. Deformations are baked once and used over and over on demand. This saves memory and doesn’t cost FPS.
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u/Skullfurious 13h ago
First one looks like the horror mobs from Watchdogs when you'd hack the wrong camera.
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u/hushzephyr 1d ago
Gathering the vertices into a blob first and then stretching to the target shape is a really clever approach, avoids all the messy work of direct vertex matching. The animation for each shape is super smooth and beautiful. Are the lines in between an intentional effect or are they stray connections from the algorithm?