I would like to create a swarm of lights, like bugs, that follow a parent object, but with a slight delay, as if it takes them time to catch up. They’re flying around randomly, while also following their leader, but lag behind a few frames. I thought this would be simple to set up, but it’s not. I thought I would use boids, but for some reason they refuse to follow a leader on the Z axis. They follow on every other axis, but not Z, and I can’t figure out why.
Instead of using boids, which are really too complicated for this purpose, I think I could use a noise texture to move the particles around. I’ve found several tutorials on this on YouTube, but I want that lag. I seem to remember some method of making things lag behind, to create motion trails on swords and such, but I can’t remember how that is achieved.
Can anyone help me out with this? This one little problem has caused me much frustration.
You can do this by just doing the Boid simulation and adding a new rule under “Boid Brain” for “Goal”. I found a random rule evaluation works best. Then just rotate your Boid object in edit mode to change what axis the Boids follow.
The noise texture method is possible but it’s not as easy as it used to be since the “Slow Parent” option is no longer available in Blender (thus making lag require more complex workarounds). The Boid simulation is going to be the easiest method.
Okay, thank you. Someone else told me to adjust the max and min air speed, which I couldn’t fathom, but it allowed the boids to move up on the Z axis. The settings I settled on were to max out the Max and .02 for the Min. I got it to something close, but still not exactly how I’d like it. I would like the swarm to be flying around a bit faster, but I can’t seem to change that, and they don’t follow the leader object closely enough. I managed a work around by duplicating the leader object and moving the keyframes forward, which makes it closer to the swarm, and then I hid the real leader.
Now, I’m at the point where I set what they render as. I kind of want them to render like glowing metaballs, but when I changed them to metaballs and increased their size, that messed up my swarm. It totally changed the swarm behavior, which I thought was locked in. Maybe I need to bake that first, but I didn’t get that far. My metaballs aren’t behaving like metaballs, and when I tried a test render, only two very small points of light rendered, not the 15 that I see in the render preview. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. It’s so frustrating. I’m constantly just saying, “WHY”??? I wish I could get an a.i. to answer these questions. I’ve heard of something like this. I hit these roadblocks every single damn time I do something in Blender.
The boid system in Blender is straight up butt compared to something like Unity. I’ve started trying to improve the system a few times, but I always realize I can save a lot of time by just doing particles in Unity instead
I don’t know what that is, but it’s not what I was going to do. I put noise into the displacement channel to move things around. Your settings will be different depending on your intention.
I was assuming you would be pinning the noise texture to an empty or something so that the empty affects where the noise is visible. In old versions of Blender you could have two empties, 1 which the user controlled and another which controlled the noise. Then the one that controlled the noise you could parent to the one the user controlled and set it to have a slow parent making it lag just a bit.
I hope you or someone can eventually make Blender Boids more user friendly. I just do not know what all the settings actually do. They don’t make sense to me. I just wanted them to be more frantic, and fly faster. I would change something, and they’d all fly apart, or do nothing. I finally got it pretty close.
I had been playing around with a single orb that I put displacement on to make it an energetic light spark, but when I imported it, everything is different in this scene and it was huge. It didn’t work the way I wanted it to.
Well, I think I have to give up on boids. I just wasted hours today trying to append what I did, and everything was messed up. I guess the scale of the scene is different, so it all changed. Boids just isn’t designed for what I want to do. I can’t control it with any precision. This is like when I was creating flack bursts for a WWII film. Doing a simulation was just overkill. I just did a shape key on some particles. So simple, and it worked perfectly.
I downloaded this blend file, and it had the same problems I had with the Blender Boids system, lack of control. I couldn’t adjust it to perform the motion I’m looking for. I tried a lot of different settings, but they all gave odd results. Nothing looked like what I want. So, back to the drawing board. I’m going to try something simpler.
Today, I just wasted a bunch of time asking Microsoft Copilot for help with creating a geometry nodes setup to do this. It was a total failure! Copilot very confidently told me that it could do this for me, but time after time, the script it sent me was total garbage. Then it told me that was because I was using version 5.1 and something had changed. This was blatant lie! Then it said Blender wasn’t allowing Python to access everything in geometry nodes. It kept assuring me that NOW it knew exactly what went wrong and it could easily fix it, which again was a blatant lie.
I am trying to learn geometry nodes, but I’m not getting very far.
As finding a solution for this seems to take much time and effort, would it be possible to just hand animate them? Not every single part separately, but something like animating a few particles parented to an empty, circling around it randomly, and having that empty follow a curve that had slightly different path from the “emitter” object. Then duplicate the empty with the children parts and the curve too, offset the keyframes randomly, and change the curve a little, then repeat. You could actually make most of the animating procedurally by adding just one keyframe for each and adding some noise generators in curve editor to right channels etc. I’m not sure would this be possible for the look you are trying to create, but this is just an idea.
Yeah, you’re right. I could do that faster. That’s probably what I’ll do. It’s the only way to control exactly how they move. I’m wasting too much time with this procedural approach.
Thanks.
