Particles. Continued.

The behavior of my fish has been a bit of a journey; but now I am convinced I have found a way of animating the fish without them looking wooden and with each one keeping a degree of individualism. Using the Dynamics/forces within Maya and the particle system you can balance out the negative/positive attraction and whether the force is attracting the whole of the particles to a particular place or repelling the other particles away from its particular 'personal space'. This result is some resarch into how to get the herding behaviour i was after with the imported script I tried at an earlier stage. The problem I was having is that the 'fish' were reacting to world space; and this was a tough one to crack seeing i lost my td. With this method it is possible to animate the attract force along a path and in theory the fish should follow.
The scene (5) will be dressed only after the particles have been cached. This should speed up the process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=royagdXNh24

Particles.

Been looking into particles and ways of steering them. Tried using a lattice; but this was too unpredictable; so now am using a curve to direct the particles. The fish have been animated on a cycle of about 200 frames to give a swimming action and then this is being instanced to the particles.
This is an experiment using the lattice. Must admit it just turned out more for the sake of 'looking pretty' rather than the particle effectivness at guideing objects.