Crawling Instances: Achieving good looking crawling insects.

[Bonedaddy]

Good start! If you start getting stuck, you might want to look into BrainBugz, which is a simplistic particle AI: http://www.kolve.com/mp_brainbugz/brainbugz.htm

[CobraX]

Thanks BoneDaddy,

One thing is sure, is that by watchin the Advanced Particle Instancing DVD, i have a lot to learn!

Now with BrainBugz it really looks nice, but i don't think that it would be well appreciated from the guys where i am going to do the shots to see me come in with my little software. Eventhough i really think that it would be done much better and faster.

However i am learning a lot by doing what i am doing now, trying to figure out how to make things work with good learning tools. I wonder what i should do now for that contract.

What do you think?

BoneDaddy, how did you start off to become a TD? What was your first job in the industry? How long did you keep that job un til you moved on to something more TD oriented? And of course how did you form yourself? With what tools?

I am currently working full time and i don't get the feeling of learning as fast as when i was learning 3D at school...when i didn't have a job.

Xavier.

[Bonedaddy]

Well, the hard part of your shot is making sure they don't collide with each other. You basically have three options:

1) Hand-animate them.
2) Radial fields. This won't work very well, I don't think. It'll screw up the motion too much.
3) Use fluids to drive the particle motion -- this will prevent interparticle collision.
4) Use or script some sort of AI program like BrainBugz or Massive. This may be overkill.


As for my work history, I started out as a render wrangler right after I got out of college. I went through about 2-3 months of unemployment after that, and then started doing TD work at the next job I got.

[kimaldis]

for the motion, something I've done in the past that works well is to use a perlin noise function, range +-1, along with an iterative method and rotate the velocity of the bugs.


I'm not explaining this very well; give the bugs each a random velocity vector, distance per frame. At each frame, update the position according to the velocity vector then rotate the velocity by the return from the noise function. Use the bug's position coordinate as arguments to the noise function.

[Bonedaddy]

That's pretty clever, Kim. I'll have to give that a go sometime.

[CobraX]

Kimaldis and BoneDaddy thank you,

I am trying right now ( as it's most urgent ) to make the character go through it's cycle while the particle drives its movement on the surface.

The challenge i am facing is to make the geometry cycle as fast as the particle is moving on the ground.

So if i have multiple particles, moving at different speeds, the geometry is animated according to the particle's speed and does not appear to SLIDE on the ground.

Damn i am lost!

It seems i can't figure this out.

[CobraX]

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