Hi All,
I was playing around with particle systems, boids, fields and collision. I came up with a rough draft of an object based particle set attracting to a point, they can never reach. They can never reach the point because the point lies inside a deflector or collision mesh.
You can view it here:
For Blender 2.5 only.
25_particle_collide_sphere.blend (244 KB)
If you stuck a tail on those guys you’d have a pretty good rendition of the first moment in a person’s life!
Thanx Atom!
Your scenes are always straight forward.
Cool Atom!
You know you can get closer to cinema’s dynamics whith Aligorith GSOC build, don’t we need that soon? 
Please see this tweak on your cool file… the blend will only work on that build. I’ve read it won’t be easy to implement that stuff on particles or dupliverts, because of some Blender limitations.
@liero: Thanks for the tip. Your X file is exactly what I was going for.
I tried this link:
But your X file did not work.
Can you post a link to the Aligorith build you are using?
There was a thread about this branch some time ago, where user Sinan linked to his blog… you could try the build there, as I think it is the one I used.
edit: the file is just a fast test over your work, to be able to render disable vector pass and blur… this branch is a lot of fun!
Thanks for the link to the blog.
Here is the link to the build that works with your file:
http://www.filefront.com/17490135/soc-2010-aligorith-2-win32.zip
However, this leaves us stuck at version 2.5.2. Also, I noticed that you converted all the particles to Mesh. This means it is no longer a particle solution, but instead, a physics based solution.
It looks like this was dropped and never included in the trunk.
Yep it’s physics based, but is a nice implementation of bullet physics, so simple to use as you don’t need to go to game mode and record anything… if this could be implemented at dupliobjects level it would look a lot like cinema’s modynamics stuff, maybe even better. And the guy promised some updates on his branch, he’s been working in his own svn tools to do this -I hope-.
Forgive me for disrupting your thread, I felt like this was related to the effect you where trying to get. And again, cool animation, the problem is that boids may not be that clever after all 
No problem, I appreciate the feedback and the effort to create an alternate solution that I was trying to achieve.
I added another entry to the spherical gravity concept.
This version was rendered using the Aligorith 2.52 build with the Bullet physics additions.
You can view it here:
do you know if this additions are now or will be on the trunk? Thanks!