Innovations.

Hi there sorry about the lack of posts. Tell the truth the only reason you are getting this post is the fact i am scanning my other hard drive and seemed a perfect time for a blog, so here goes. As the title suggests I am going to give you an overview on my innovations project.

Well, one of the scenes I have been working on led me to look at how fish team together; but still have a degree of autonomy, and how I could replicate this within Maya. Firstly I started looking at animated instanced fish plotted along a motion path-too wooden. Then I tried a flow path; again with the fish animated. Again this was too regimented and the way the fish turned alng the curve still looked although they were turning as one (the inside fish moved a lot less than the outer ones). Even with the help of a wave lattice deformer to give the fish a bit more 'swim this did not work).This has led me to look at particle systems and per particle behaviors.
I found a lesson online which looked at the way butterflies flapped their wings and how to animate a group of them. I ended up taking the animation snapshot part of this lesson and taking that back to the animating an object along a curve to get some direction. This also staggers the animation of the fish and makes them look more natural.

Here we can see an animation snapshot; over two hundred frames.

This is the frames spread along a cv curve.

This is the frames relpacing the particles with the toll on the normal settings;

and this is the particles drawn in the rough shape of a 'bait ball'. The direction of the particles is preserved as per velocity (as long as the onigonal geometry was aligned with the x axis. the depth of the bait ball can be altered with the particles /transform. More to come; but must dash atm, got some sound files to find....