Making Birds and Butterflies Quickly

Creating detailed 3D models and animations for flying creatures can be time-consuming and challenging. Here's a Quick Tip to build some birds, butterflies or other flying creatures that are good for mid and background assets without the 2D limitations of a traditional sprite sheet.

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1. Creating the Texture

• Create your bird texture (half will work)
• Position it all the way to the left of the texture sheet, and leave enough room to the right so it can scroll over as many wings as you build into your mesh.
• In our case, we will have six 3D wing frames, so we will have 6 total texture panels.

2. Creating the Geometry

• Start with a flat plane with one subdivision.
• Align your UVs so the plane is symmetrical across the subdivision. 
• Duplicate it and bend the tips up.
• Do this 5 more times to get six total meshes, each a different phase of the flapping wing.
• Combine your meshes

3. Adjusting UVs

• Move each wing phase’s UV one panel to the right of its previous state, essentially recreating the layout of our texture we built.

4. Setup in Unreal

• Import your mesh and texture. 
• Make a new material and add your texture as a Particle Sub UV parameter.
• Assign this material to your bird mesh.
• Make a new Niagara System.
• Add a mesh renderer and point it to your bird mesh.
• Set the Facing Mode to Velocity. Set the Sub Image Size to 6 and 1.
• Add a Sub UVAnimation module in particle Update.
• Set the start frame to 0, end frame to 5.
• Lastly, drop your Niagara System in your level and watch your birds fly.
• Add different noises and velocity modules to make your birds fly at different speeds and directions.

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