Swarm Tutorials or Tips

[studiomiguel]

On a note, I have searched the sticky tutorial thread without finding any tutorials that will suffice.
Thanks,
M

[Lacrimas]

Might work:

Make a curve, select it and go effects->"create curve flow".

Tweak the curve and the goals so the particles looks like they're behaving like swarming bees...

now, model a (low res?) bee, select it then select the particles and go particles->instancer.

In the Flow_ParticleShape node scroll down and mess around with the attributes under the instancer roll out... (like setting aimdirection to velocity...)

(Maybe you want to add expressions or whatnot to make the bees fly a little more random and dynamic, but that is up to you)...

[bigfatMELon]

For swarming behavior, the flow field stuff with some turbulence is great for getting the swarm from one place to another but it might look a little too "flowish."

If you need a swarm to hover or follow an arbitrary goal, give UltraSwarm a shot. The only big drawback is that being goal and avoidance based means that it might rubber band a bit too much like a softbody. I engineered it so that all the parameters are keyable to help smooth this out but it can't always be avoided. Especially at high speeds with a small swarm size.

If you are looking for that, oh so currently popular, "swarm eminating from some point" look (Green Mile, Mummy), then try the following.

create a directional emitter and point it in the initial direction you would like the swarm to go.
select the particle shape, scroll to the per-particle array attributes section and locate the field called Acceleration.
right click on that field and choose Runtime Expression.
in the expression editor type

float $swarmSpeed = 3;
acceleration = ($swarmSpeed * sphrand (1));

changing the value of $swarmSpeed will change the speed of their behavior.


-jl

[bigfatMELon]

BTW, I posted an example of UltraSwarm in action at: http://homepage.mac.com/julianlove/.Movies/ultraSwarmTest.mov

Just a quick test render to give you an idea of what it can do.

-jl

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