Thinking Particles : Basic Flocking
Posted in Cinema4D Thinking Particles on July 28th, 2010 by TimI’m sure a lot of you remember the blog that I used to have, the original pages hosted on the HYPA server. It wasn’t really a blog, but more of a mish-mash of my experiments, downloads etc.
I often get requests for the downloads, so I do intend to repost them all eventually. I posted the light presets a while back and now I am going to repost the Thinking Particles presets.
The first offering is my TP Basic Flocking example. This is a really simple setup that shows you how you can create a flocking or swarming type effect using Thinking Particles.
Basic Flocking Xpresso
As you can see from the Xpresso, there is not a lot to it. The particles are all in the same default All group. I’ve added a null which is then animated along a spline. This null is used as a Follow Position for the particles. As the particles try to follow the nulls position, there is some hidden geometry that is used as a Deflector, this helps to add a little chaos to the motion. I’ve used the Particle Collision preset to stop the particles colliding with each other too.
I hope you find this useful. Don’t forget that you can also clone onto the Thinking Particles using MoGraph if you want to start mixing up some MoGraph and TP techniques. Lots of fun to be had for sure.
