Simulating Flocks, Herds, and Swarms using Experimental Boids Particles

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boids.jpgBoids particle systems can be set to follow basic rules and behaviors, something close to artificial intelligence. They’re useful for simulating flocks, swarms, herds and schools of various kind of animals, insects and fishes.


Blender’s Boid Particles in Action:

For many more details, go here. Be sure to check out a step-by-step tutorial, created by olivS, on How to setup a prey-predator relationship using Boids particles.

The new particle system can be tested by installing one of the experimental builds available at graphicall.org.

Note: Do not use experimental builds for mission-critical projects or files. Although tested, they are still unofficial releases and are subject to change at any moment.

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    • hitaro

      wow!! very impressive video. Very useful for crowd simulation.

    • crazybus

      This is great, I had no idea it was being integrated into blender. But now I can make penguins march though my cities just like in batman (read the paper to see which one)

      P.S. Is this page just displaying strangely for me or is it for everyone?

    • http://charliemcfarlane.com charliemcf

      nope displaying weird for me (firefox, win vista).

      on subject very cool, handy for animation :D
      think this could help some of the movies out there a lot ;)

      //charlie

    • kram1032

      Very nice :D
      “Schools”… also Human schools, when the kids leave it and go home ^^

      The text field, I’m writing in, stretches over the whole width of the page O.o
      The Youtube vid is on the right side of the page. next to the small preview pic and the title….
      usually, it should be beyond that.

      Oh, and the navigator line went down on bottom of the page… I guess, the rest tries to fill out the additional space to the right…
      What happened?
      (Using FF and XP64)

    • http://irukado.org Lee

      Hmm. It’s hard to tell how much animation the birds themselves have. Can the individual particles be instructed too? Say, to change their animation cycle? I’m thinking that, for crowd simulations, you need characters to walk, look around, argue, climb over each other, etc.

    • http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com Kernon

      Yeah, the page formatting got “optimized” by WordPress but, it’s been corrected.

    • kram1032

      back to normal layout :D
      good :)
      fast fix :D

      Lee: I think, they don’t have any.
      The rules are something like:
      follow the green ball
      avoid the red ball
      avoid other birds
      and then, the standard rotation, how they usually should fly :)

    • kram1032

      oh, and
      avoid the walls of the (invisible boundary) cube :)

    • http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com Kernon

      This would be great for air and space battles. With multiple systems going, designing those types of scenes will be a lot easier.

    • Igor

      Thank you Kernon for posting this! Looks Great!!!

    • http://magicalpictures.net thondal

      So, if i’m correct you make a model, for example a bird, a walkin man. with an animation then you call it with the particle system and voila you have a walking crowd etc?

      -thondal-

    • cekuhnen

      very impressive

    • DramaKing

      This looks like a big step for Blender. I’ve never heard of BOID particles being used in any other 3D package.

    • Gat

      Hahaha, I love it! This is just something that animating by hand would take ages! Plus, this way it even looks much more realistic.

    • http://gordallott.wordpress.com gord

      heh boids are fun and always have been, but everything ends up looking like a swarm of fish rather than a flock of birds or whatever

    • Joe

      Boids were used extensively in the Lord of the Rings movies. I saw a little ‘making of’ that provided a little detail of how they did it. It was like kram1023 said, they would set up some basic rules and let it run. They even set up a ‘scared Orc” routine where some of the Orcs would run away from the battles.

    • jason h

      This looks like a great way to simulate aerial dogfights, such as those in world war II. I’m gonna have to look into that.

    • Matthew

      nice I bet you can make a cool game with that

    • http://harkyman.com harkyman

      Joe — LOTR used MASSIVE, which is a full-on crowd simulation system. As far as I know, there is no support for variable animation in the BOIDS physics in Blender. It’s just another way of animating the particles. Well, not “just” — it’s very cool.

    • Mikeq

      well I think the dog fight thing would work if they are used for the distance shots. all we have to do is figure out how to get the little particles to shoot.

    • lindamus

      Wow…

      Something to play with tonight.

    • Tynach

      Cool. Should be very useful!

    • http://iluvblender.googlepages.com Satish “iluvblender” Goda

      2 words….

      Friggin sweet!!!!

    • http://blendersi.weebly.com/index.html ros

      Cool.Wow. Blender is getting so cool! Thanks to developers!

    • Rui Paulo Sanguinheira Diogo

      @harkyman:
      You can pick the particle objects out of a group which can consist of differently animated (and of course differently shaped) objects. So if you are doing something very simple you could do something similar to mass battle scenes with quite a lot of variety. With Massive you could assign different behavioural patterns which could go far beyond simple boid behaviour. That’s of course not possible with a boid system which (as the name implicates) just calculates boids behaviour! ;)

      In fact: I’ve played around with it for an article for the german Linux Magazine (issue 12/07) and it’s extremly cool!!! Unfortunately there are still some bugs (or my build wasn’t good enough – I don’t want to blame Janne for it) – meaning that some files I’ve created cause segfaults after loading.

    • cekuhnen

      I think even when this is of course not what they use in feature movies with complex hord simulations
      the new addition still provides a very good tool.

      think about under water scenes with fishes, or yeah birds. versions back you would have animated them by hand.

      this saves animators a lot of work now.

      pretty good addition.

    • http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com Kernon

      harkyman has a great crowd simulation script that really has some nice features. Maybe the two can be combined to create a scene where hundreds of people are running and flailing their arms while swarms of birds are dive-bombing them.

      http://www.harkyman.com/blender-people/

    • aws357

      Agreeing with Kernon.

      Boids are interesting. Blenderpeople is interesting (though confusing too).
      Mixing these two would definitely a great idea.

      Maybe for the future open movie (project Shnozberry) :)

    • http://pacyang.blogsite.org pacyang

      Great ! very impressive !