Behavioural Particles
Lately in my (fairly sparse) spare time I had some fun with particles. Merely playing around a bit with different kinds and in several 3d packages but I thought I’d share the following combo with you.
The simulation basically consists of a pretty simple flocking setup where some wandering masters are chased by a bunch of predator boids, all of them spawning a good amount of trailing particles which then get affected by a bunch of other forces. I kinda liked some of the patterns it formed, here are some stills:
It started out as a few tests and a bit of playing with a particle renderer I had heard good things about: Krakatoa, trying out its fast point rendering ability. And if it says fast, it is fast (!) rendering 7+ million particles with self-shadowing and 4 steps moblur at 720p resolution in just under 1 minute/frame on my 2.93 dualcore laptop. It can also do voxel rendering which gets (obviously) a bit slower but for sure the better choice for more dense/smoky effects. Krakatoa is currently only available as a plugin for 3dsmax but let that not hold you back (unless you’re a max user – win!) from giving it a go as there are some kindly written exporters available for packages like Softimage (thanks Steven Caron) and Maya. This simulation was done using Softimage ICE.
I uploaded it to vimeo, best viewed in HD but still losing a good amount of detail so if you want the real deal you can download it here (720p – 370MB).
Jo
