Swarms of Bees

[wedge]

make one bee and use a particle instancer.... thats how they made swarms of scarabs in the Mummy. if the bees need to go around things, make proxy geometry that bounce the bees away.

[alphatron]

There are a few scripts/plugins on highend 3D that could prodce something similar for you. I think one is called Flocking Hell. There are other free ones as well. Sort of rudimentary crowd simulators.

[artifish]

yeah, those scripts are a good start - but afaik only one of them ( "flock" by john kundert gibbs) works on particles (it adds an particle expression to your particle shape, this can get kindof slow if you've got lots of bees). i think, the others just use standard objects (but you've got to verify that for yourself). i'd advice to go with particles as you've got great control over the movement though the different fields (caching helps a lot, too) - remember the x-files movie? the bees there were particles moved by standard fields and a flocking algorithm.
i developed a particle field node (actually a set of different fields, but they are all combined in one node) for exactly this purpose ... in fact flocking is only one of the possibilities of behavioural animating particles with it. though there is stil room for improvement, it is faster than the mel approach, as it is completely based on c++.
i was going to release in short term -just waiting for my beta testers to finish some example animations they wanted to provide. so in case you are interested, give me a shout.

cheers, carsten

[misfit73]

can anyone help me out to animate a swarm of bees in 3dsmax. thanks

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