Hello to all,
I have a question which I found a .blend file for once but can’t find it now or figure it out. In the Blender book under the particles section it states that it can make flock of birds. I can’t seem to grasp this technique. Can anyone help? I actually want to use butterflies instead of birds but think the concept is the same, right? Thanks to all.
The idea is that you make one buttefly, make the particles, parent the butterfly to the particles and enable Duplivert on the butterfly. This will make a separate butterfly follow each particle, and will not show the particles themselves.
Yup… too bad there’s still no “slightly random time offset” setting for the dupliverts though. Because of this I normally end up doing it all by hand, having every butterfly flap it’s wings at exactly the same moment doesn’t do them any good.
Never tried this, but you might have several butterflies, flapping their wings at different times/speeds, and create several particle systems. Overlapping might be a problem, though…
I think the flock of birds example is explained in the official 2.0 manual - I’ll have to check when I get home. I think the flock of birds blend file is in the file pointed at by the ‘Blender 2.37 regression suite’ link on the blender download page http://www.blender.org/cms/Blender.31.0.html From what I remember the animation looks random.
… chaos theory joke anyone?
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Not detailed in the 2.0 manual but I am sure I have seen the tutorial for the birds somewhere. I’ll dig around.
This is my first time posting on this site and let me say it works. Thank you all for responding to my post. I will try these tonight as soon as I get a chance. All sound good and I will have to try them, or perhaps with a variation of all of them. Agian, thanks to the people with great skills and knowledge in Blender.
I think Harkyman has a really good physical correct Flocking python script. Just google Blenderpeople or something.
Thanks guys for your help. I knew I could count on the people of blender and Elysium’s community. The problem was I didn’t use the vertex keys to animate wing movement, and plus, I had the dupliverts on my butterfly and not the emiter. Also, thanks “Purple” I found that .blend file for the flock of birds. Here they used three birds with different speeds to vary the outcome of the flocks flight so every doesn’t flap it’s wings at the same time. If I only knew how to upload my file to my post. Thanks again.