particles

ONE BY ONE: Particle Systems – PART 3 Use Boid Particles for flocking! Plus a bit of BLENDER 3.0!

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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.

ONE BY ONE: Modifier Particle Systems – PART 2 Use “keyed” Particles for simple Particle morphing!

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I love Blender…

…and I love talking about the particle system. As this one demonstrates! It’s part 2 of my videos about how to use it, how to take the particles and make them morph across multiple targets and produce some interesting effects.

Hope this helps you get your head around the Keyed particle setting in Blender.

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.

ONE BY ONE: Blender’s Particle System made simple – Part 1

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I love Blender…

You didn’t know that, did you?

You did, oh then you’ll know I like it’s particle system too.

I do find it interesting that it’s a modifier, though. It should have a tab all to itself… Well, actually it does.

The fact that you can apply it as a modifier could be a throwback to an earlier less comprehensive version of the system, because it’s HUGE in terms of content. This video is the first in a short series of films about how to understand and make all sorts of wonderful things with the particle system, covering the basics of getting an emitter to emit directionally, making it emit objects and controlling it with a simple turbulence field.

Stream of objects, here we come! Hope you like it.

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.