Symbiote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZS6DgMN-oE
I had the idea to recreate the tentacle growth effect from the film "Edge of Tomorrow," but in Unreal Engine.
I focused entirely on the logic and technical implementation of the effect. The visuals are still simple, but I hope to improve them in the future.
First, I created a procedural walking animation in the control rig, where the character didn't move his legs, but rather gave the impression of movement.
Then I created the tentacles in Blender using GeoNodes. To create the tentacle growth effect, I baked the difference between states 0 and 1—that is, fully compressed and expanded—and wrote it down to UV coordinates in the U channel. I also wrote a gradient along the entire length of the tentacle in the V channel.
During movement, Blueprint calculates and passes mask values ​​​​to the material, and the material calculates the displacement using WPO and the mask opacity based on the Blueprint data and vectors baked in Blender.