Re: Help - Behaviour and Bird Flocks

Date : Tue, 31 May 2005 10:37:47 -0700
To : XSI(at)Softimage.COM
From : "Bradley R. Gabe" <brad(at)cg-soup.com>
Subject : Re: Help - Behaviour and Bird Flocks
If you're doing only 300 characters, it may be few enough to get your flight paths done with particle sim and then plot your birds onto them. You can do things like using velocity to control speed of wing flapping and direction to control wing posture, etc.

Unless you're really keen on using behavior for this effect? It may also be a good situation for learning.

-Brad

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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