Animating fishes and butterflies

To kick things off, let’s discuss a very common application of vertex displacement – the creation of a simple movement animation for a fish or a butterfly.

To do this, we’ll first learn the basics of creating vertex displacement in the Shader Graph; then, we’ll focus on the fish animation and see how to introduce time in the mix. Finally, we’ll reapply these concepts to our butterfly model and adapt the previous logic to create a wing-flapping movement.

Moving fishes thanks to a vertex displacement shader

Our goal will be to use a shader to automatically have our fishes wobble in the water, like this:

Figure 12.1 – A school of fishes deformed and animated thanks to vertex displacement shaders

First things first, we need to create our FishWobbling shader and learn how to do vertex displacement. Because we’re working on 3D models, this time, we’ll use the Lit...