This is an attempt to study boids. (side note: we need a physics / particles subforum)
I’ve made this simple file where particle boids shaped like TIE fighters are emitted from a cube. Each boid displays 3 children (including itself) and I want to be able to tweak their settings to feel like a Star Wars battle.
Each time my animation cycle begins, the particles all reset (frame 250 back to frame 1). Is there a way boids could continue where they left off and just keep going?
How can I get them to barrel roll (individual centres).
Can I parent them to flock around an empty so that when I move the empty around, the boids are pulled along as a swarming group?
How do I stop them congregating like they tend to now? - it looks weird.
go to the render buttons and set the number of frames for the animation (under dimensions on 2.55 and all other variants I’ve seen, so I think it will be in the same place on 2.56) and also increase the lifetime to suit.
Use an object (or empty) with “force” force to attract or repel boids. (-ve attracts + repels)
All the settings under boids (partials tab) do various things:
To stop them congregating turn up the “air personal space”
To make them barrel roll (or turn steeper) use the bank settings.
I am also interested in boids being an easy way of doing space battles, with the reactor particals on each for deaths etc.
Here are a couple of scenes I put together playing with the boids system.
A couple of problems I ran into are that boids never stop “twitching”. It becomes quite annoying and destroys the illusions of natural swarming. Also the boids particle system can not deploy objects that have particle systems within them. Like ships with exhaust. Or ships with lasers that fire. etc…
Ideally I would like to have a mesh object with a particle system exhaust and a particle system for weapons. The weapons should be another boids system that can kill particles in another system.
You see how the complexity can arise very quickly. The Blender particle system just can not do that.
One thing you can leverage is multiple camera angles. If you put enough boids in action, in a space scene, you can cleverly avoid that shots that contain the most twitching.
Here is a 2.5 setup for a boids particle system attracted to a target, then not being able to reach the target is deflected by a mesh.
Overall, I find that boids like lots of room to perform more naturally. So scale things up a bit, but do not forget to apply visual transformations. Don’t be afraid to use large numbers. Also the closer you can match your particle size to the spherical collision range, the more realistic the collisions will be.
Oops, I was wrong about how to attract boids to one area. That method works, but will also attract explosion particals etc.
The proper way to do it is to give the empty a “boids” force in the positive, and then to select the boids and go to the tab labeled ‘boid brain’ Under that add a “goal” widget.
The strength of the boids force is how much it attracts them.
Only just realised I’d had all these great responses. sdfgsdfg - yes, I’d been experimenting a bit with having a goal target of an empty to give them something to chase - works well. If I have children, the children all seem to do exactly the same as the parent - wondering if there’s a way. Atom - That movie is pretty good; the spaceships firing lasers are all boids? How did you get the camera to track the one you have in focus?