RE: Help - Behaviour and Bird Flocks

["Sebastien Nadeau" <sebastien.nadeau(at)ubisoft.com>]

Hi Sandy!

           

Like you said, populate tool and the flock Object in behavior will only work on a ground

 “The DrvFlock object provides elements to manage the flocking motion of a group of actors on a 2D surface”.

 To create what you want you will have to create “boids” (http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/)

 

Looking at the Boids exemple is certainly the best thing to do. It might look a bit confusing if you never used behavior before, but I am sure that if you spend a couple of hours studying it you will be able to modify it to suit your needs. For the shot you want to create, you probably will be able to use most of the functions as they are. If you’ve never used behavior before, it would be good to go through a couple of tutorials before, so that you get used to the basic concepts and the doc.

I don’t see any other way you could accomplish this shot in behavior.

 

For the distribution, I would probably place a couple of object by hand to determine the region where I want to distribute, then randomly pick position around those object.

Also, you could try using particles in XSI to distribute the birds, you store the position of each particles in a text file that you then use in behavior to distribute your birds.

 

Good luck

 

Sebastien Nadeau

VFX cinematics

Ubisoft

 

 

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From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of Sandy Sutherland
Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 9:35 AM
To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Subject: Help - Behaviour and Bird Flocks

 

Hi Guys,

 

I am in the begginings of this shot which needs 300 odd bird characters flying upwards in a spiral sort of flock thing, now I am a complete novice to Behaviour - so have tried to find a way to populate a scene and fly stuff upwards!!  So Far:  Behaviour is great at Crowd / Ground interaction stuff - easy to populate a ground terrain thing, but as soon as you do so, your characters are stuck to the ground - I drew a curve spiralling upwards to try and get them to move upwards - no way, they amble aimlessly around on the ground without direction.  Try Flocking, you cannot draw a flock target in the air, it has to be on the floor/terrain - I looked at the boids example, it is sort of what I need, BUT for a novice, it is very daunting to try and reverse engineer the scripts to find out what is going on, AND the world file is pre-populated, so it is difficult to see how to do this even!

 

Anyone got any help for me please - pointers etc..  even a small behaviour scene file would be great to look at!

 

Thanks a mill'

 

Sandy

 

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Sandy Sutherland  Digital Doodeller - TD
The Refinery (Cape)  http://www.refinery.co.za
mailto:sandy(at)refinery.co.za
(P) (+27 21) 480 3132  (F) (+27 21) 480 3101
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