I love Blender…

But I’m still a bit confused by the Boids Physics section. Based on the Boids AI system written by Craig Reynolds in 1986 – I know, 1986!! – it is a fight or flight artificial intelligent flocking system. But it’s controls are a bit twitchy to say the least, including a brain system that works as a list from the top down and the fact that you can only set the fuzzy logic side of these en masse, not being able to set the flocking lower or higher than, say, the fight instinct.

That could be better.

Also, and I’m not moaning, but it would be nice if, say, when you are adding a flock of birds to your system, you could add them as a collection of objects that you could loop through, so you could add an animation to them.

I managed to do this in Maya back in 2008 for a 3DWorld Magazine Tutorial – you can see the results here:

https://youtu.be/R-h55CGWrgQ

And the tutorial here:

https://gen-vfx.com/2019/10/23/how-do-i-simulate-a-flock-of-birds

I do mention, whilst doing this tutorial, that there is an add-on (paid) that takes a bit of the mystery out of the setup and offers a lot of choices in the process such as models (birds, insects, butterflies etc) and flight motion (flocking and motion specifically) without all the messy twiddling I got up to in this tutorial.

https://www.blendermarket.com/products/spyderfy-bug-system-add-on I recommend trying it out..

You want to see something not here? Then let me know in the comments. I’m always keen to help out where I can.

Take care and stay safe.