Flocking and schooling Tweet

[haze]

In my off time I've written a script to simulate flocking in Octane. It does this by scattering a number of meshes and rotating them to face a certain direction, and applying the Boids rules to them repeatedly. The result is a realistic looking (and very configurable) school of fish, or flock of birds. You can generate the exact same sequence of movements over and over again without storing the translations/rotations - just by keeping the random seed value that you started with. In other words, for a convincing flock/school irrespective of size, it only takes around 32 bytes of storage.

You can make these fish do anything - you could tell them to collectively move over to a certain location, avoid a certain area, etc etc with minimal effort.

I've made a short movie clip of one such animation. I'd like to gauge interest - being a personal project, if there was enough interest I would spend more of my own time developing this into a configurable GUI and make it easier to use, then release it.

[bepeg4d]

Wow, very powerful
Count me in
ciao beppe

[pegot]

This is really neat! I'm interested. Would this only be available in Standalone or could the script also work in the Blender plugin?

[prehabitat]

This looks great!

[haze]

This is really neat! I'm interested. Would this only be available in Standalone or could the script also work in the Blender plugin?

Theoretically it can, but I'm not sure that the plugin allows you to load a lua script for Octane itself to execute

[prehabitat]

Actually reminds me of leaves/seed pods falling on a slight uplifting wind,

Can it be used with similar random movement but a plane (below) being the anchor? (Ie gravity)?

Or even better could chose two influencers; gravity and wind...

[haze]

Yes - it is very easy to do so. In fact, if I developed it further I would probably have a list of points or perhaps geometry to fly or swim around/away-from/towards etc.

[Inverse404]

Such a function would be super awesome, can we try out your dev script node ?

[haze]

Here it is. Please remember it is really not a finished product.. You can currently only go forwards in time with the sim.