Yesterday all of our group members met at AACAD to work on our project. After our in-class group-work session on Wednesday, we agreed upon a division-of-labor and a plan of attack for some upcoming animation and modeling tasks. My responsibilities were to continue working on the car model, model a chandelier for our house's living room, and begin procedural animation of a small swarm of flies.
At AACAD, I first worked on modeling a chandelier. I originally thought this would be an interesting scripting task...the idea would be to write a script that placed cylinders of varying sizes in a regular pattern along the circumferences of some concentric circles. Turns out that Maya's "Duplicate Special" option really makes the scripting unnecessary.
The swarm of flies will be inspired by some various "classic" flocking algorithms. The basic idea is to first create a locator, then distribute some spheres (placeholders for more detailed models) in a uniform random distribution around that locator, assign them each some random initial velocity, and then update each in accordance with the following rules:
1) If any sphere is beyond some threshold distance away from the locator, then give it acceleration directly towards the locator.
2) If any two spheres are "too close" to each other, according to some threshold, then give them acceleration away from each other.
3) Introduce small random perturbation to the accelerations.
4) Update the velocity in accordance with the acceleration.
5) Update the position in accordance with the velocity. Repeat.
This script is not yet complete, but its development is well underway and I hope to finalize it in the upcoming week.
