Unreal 5 VFX Jumping Dolphins

I wanted to make some VFX work that would capture the essence of a pod of dolphins jumping. This was a real fun challenge getting the timing and position of all the different components. I started with animating my Dolphin mesh with a curve path and damp constraints in Blender. Then I split that animation into 3 parts: the “swim to breach”, breach to dive” and “dive to swim” frames. After that I baked the animation sequences into vert animation particle meshes. Then in Niagara I just set up death events to spawn the next part of the cycle as well as the water effects that would go with it.