Peasant Village, Visual effects in live action
Peasant Village - “Stupid” crowd sim & The Bug
I’ve been continuing my work on the “stupid” crowd sim. One might debate if you can really call it a simulation, because the particles that drive the bugs are “stupid” and do not consider each other at all. I’ve also been testing a couple of plugins (brainbugz and crowd maker), but decided that it would be more fun do do it on my own.
Anyways! It works pretty good. The problem is that the particles do not collide, so the bugs can walk through each other. I tried fixing this by first making each particle into a radial field to repel the others. This did not work. Neither did redoing the sim with nParticles and using the built in “self collide” function.
The problem is that I have the surface as a particle goal (with a value of 1). I am driving the particles along the surface with expressions. So after the fields have no affect, or the collision is “over” the particles snap back into place (to the position given from the expressions). And this looks kind of weird. Got to solve this…
The actual bug was made from scratch and was modelled, textured, rigged and animated in two days. As it won’t be up close in the final scene, we thought a normal mapped low poly version would suffice. We’re aiming at having a couple of hundred bugs in the final scene (with maybe 5 to 6 variations of the instanced bug, speed, size, texture etc).
Next entry: Base Mesh!
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