Spider -

A spider walk test for a short I'm working on.

[@RobertDigitalArtist]

Haha nice. Hey I'm wondering if you could help. I'm working on a school of fish that need to follow a path as a group (while still maintaining individual offset animation and with delay so they really act like a school of fish or flock of birds). I tried it with pFlow (using an animated fish model as instanced geometry) and drawing a spline and using the Speed by Icon attached to that path, which works but the fish just don't orient to their moving direction as accurately and smoothly as I need (it is following it as I turned on options like 'speed space follow and 'use icon orientation', yet it's not looking great) and I also ideally would want the option to later disperse them if a shark comes in for example (maybe with a space warp), Any idea how to set that up (better)?

[@nalunui]

While I don't have a tutorial in video form for anything like this, you can combine an animated model with particle flow to create flocks, swarms, or schools ... I can give you a link to one of my old written tutorials for a couple of similar ideas and you can adjust from there. I hope they help: tutorials.render-test.com/birds.html tutorials.render-test.com/herd.html tutorials.render-test.com/bees.html These are similar, while not exactly fish you can probably manipulate them or at least get yourself on the right track to creating a school of fish. =)

[@RobertDigitalArtist]

Clint DiClementi Thanks Clint, appreciate your tuts (I'm subscribed) and help here and will check those out. I'm a newbie when it comes to particles but I'm getting there haha. Mostly the part of orientation was my problem, even with all the options selected, the school of fish I had clearly did orient to their moving direction but only with very large curves and not smaller movements and not as quickly or as smoothly as needed to make it look natural (fish often make very quick turns).. I'm almost thinking of just leaving pflow out of this for this specific purpose (but I'll use it for birds) and copying another method I used which was just a path and path deform. It looks much better and natural but not as useful for large swarms and those 'tornadoes' of sardines you sometimes see. Thx, I'll see how far I get with your samples.