I Finally got around to knocking out Camtasia tutorials following the initial flocking tryout in the previous blog entry. I've split it into two parts; theory - lots of drawing vectors on whiteboards, explaining how these simple flocks work and practice - how to get it going in ICE.

Next step on from meshcrawling particles (here) was going to be some loose motion control using curves to control flow of particles over the surface. But then I got to thinking that maybe proper flocking, a la Craig Reynolds (see here) might not be so hard and, since the crawler node was designed to work within the particle sim loop, I could design it as a general purpose flocking tool and still have it work with the mesh tool.

(Click to Enlarge)Some time ago I was asked to work out a method for animating many thousands of characters across arbitrarilly complex surfaces. The solution turned out to be surprisingly simple but the nature of pre-7.0 particles made it a bit messy in practice so it seemed natural to have a stab at making it work in ICE.

A video of the animation can be found here