Your python script for animation of the hand grasp
will save me alot of time in animating !! :-)

Message edited on: 06/26/2004 12:18

I'd just like to say thanks, Ockham. Just cause your efforts in general save a lot of people a lot of time. :) (and sorry I never got back to you on that -- it's been a crazy couple months)

I wondered about that Swarm thing.... figured you just lost interest. Still seems like a good idea; maybe I should just freestufficate it as it stands, and let it be improved by suggestions.

Actually, I'd like to say thanks to Ockham too...

It's pretty good, really. I'd say definitely go for it. Should cause a little ripple when folks see what can be done with it...

"swarm thing"? That wouldn't be a script for animating a bee or a bat and having the rest follow through the flight path, would it? and many, many thanks for all these scripts! Carolly the Curious

It's more like particles (single-object props) swarming around in a specified area, parented to a "container". I've worked some on that chain-of-ducklings idea. Might be worth returning to it.... Ah. Now I see what it needs. Talking about these things helps!

no kidding -- I just thought about something: think it would be possible to add the ability to use figures in swarm in addition to Props? Perhaps through a readscript call? prolly not, but had to ask...

Oh Ghod.... This could be the destitute man's base layer for a pseudoscene engine. Massive (tm) at the nanoatomic level!

hee hee The ODF Dandies product is made using a different script that does much the same thing. When I made the set, I wanted to provide users with a lower resolution dandelion than Transpond's -- my problem was that I needed about 100 dandelions, and after 5 of TPs, my system was crapping out. Since I also didn't want to sit there and click on the flower 100 times to load it, I needed a solution that would allow me to load a whole bunch of them, yet still be able to move them about both individually and as groups. The ODF dandies can do that. One click lets you load 25 plants. It's really cool, and they don't kill your scene. This tool speeds up the process of creating things like that as well as providing the basic underpinings for a standard particle system. ODF Maejyrie (which is being developed from the old BE Creatives magic pak and is expanding dramatically on it) will really show off what this sort of thng can do. I've used both swarm and the original for it.

Figures in swarm: Sure. It's just a matter of substituting BODY for the "single prop". Can be done automatically, but can lead to memory overload pretty easily! (Imagining 150 Vicky's swarming around Cesar Romero....)

Cesar wouldn't mind.... Then please, do so. I've got some articulate props that I sorta need to do this with, lol hmmm... Combine that with some of the crowd things, maybe Lyrra's randomizer, and... *wanders off into a wall...

Well it's like the difference between Brycetech's bat and Ghastley's bat: if you need a closeup with blood dripping from fangs and fur glistening in the fog you use BT's... but 3000 of them pouring from a cave at dusk would kill most computers. But hand-posing and -positioning even several dozen of Ghastley's bats is tedious. After 40, I started cloning and scaling in PhotoShop.... but that won't work in an animation. Massive is an incredible tool, but we aren't Weta or Pixar with their resources and render farms. However, being able to do something like that on a smaller simpler scale would be impressive. Carolly

Particularly if the clustered could: (a)be assigned a bodypoint that would show up in the keyframe editor as the root to drag the whole lot around with one set of translation controls, simplifying the pathing task, and... (b)there was some way to define a field of movement about that bodypoint, where random XYZ shifts could be defined (all values being input fields, so that the size of the field could be set to match scene requirements). Or each added object sets itself in frame 1 with it's creation point automatically becoming its 'null' position, and the random motions being defined by percentage of shift across each axis (and a simple number generator to vary the speed of the displacement across a chosen time frame), to allow some cluster objects more XY displacement while some have XZ and others YZ. That would break the gross repetitive 'look' that you can get with automated scripting. (Thinking animated firefly scatters here, where you would have some doing vertical climbs with little horizontal displacement, the occasional cowboy zipping horizontally acrosss the group) And I chose the nano-atomic reference deliberately... :P Massive is quite well beyond, true enough...but one thing that gets overlooked a lot in the 'Rings' movies is that it wasn't just Massive; they used the -entire- bag of movie tricks, from forced perspective up. And while Poser alone couldn't really do too many of them due to the way things work, Poser and something like VuePro could.

Attached Link: troopers

The Swarm script already does (a). You begin
with a chosen container. The script fills the
bounding box of the container with particles,
all parented to the container. Each particle
stays within the bounding box in its subsequent
moves. So you can make the gnats fly
(more or less) together by moving the container.

Point (b) is interesting. Strict mathematical
randomizing is unsatisfactory for biological
purposes. I used to write programs for perception
experiments, and found that I had to cheat to avoid
clusters and "winning streaks". (With pure
randomizing, the program would play Clip 1 several
times in a row, then Clip 4 several times in a row,
and so on. This doesn't sound random to a human
observer, and leads to unwanted conditioning.)

You're describing a similar problem in
spatial terms. I'll play around and see
how it needs to be cheated!

Message edited on: 06/27/2004 12:06

Ockham I looked for the swarm script but can't locate it in freestuff. I am in desperate need of something like this which will randomly fill the volume of a specified container shape with a specified number of a given prop (or figure).

The specific image I'm working on is a barnyard scene of a woman feeding chickens by tossing kernels of corn from a bowl. I need to create that "spray" or "scatter" or whatever you want to call it of the corn kernels as they leave her hand. If your script can do that is there any way I can get my hands on it? pleeeeeze?

I don't need this script to animate for the image I'm working on although that would be nice for the future. It would also be nice to have a script that would "scatter" props in a conic volumetric spray pattern that follows a parabolic trajectory. This could be used for things like fountain sprays. I've seen one for gunshell eject, but that is too narrow a path for my needs.

Thanks - I'm a great admirer of your work!

Message edited on: 06/27/2004 15:45

Ronstuff -- see IM

I'm working on it at this moment... will post here when it's sort of working.

Attached Link: http://ockhamsbungalow.com/PPP/Swarm4.zip

Thanks a Zillion! I'll give it a shot :-)

Hmmmm... Gonna take some tweaking and experimenting with values, but already can see some use for this one. Thanks for the work, Ockham!