Digital Tutors - Creating a Realistic Insect Crowd Simulation

Throughout these lessons we'll develop an easy to control crowd simulation system with geometry instanced to Maya's nParticles. Maya's robust particle instancing system, along with the ability to precisely control particle movement along a surface, makes it easy to create an army of insects crawling along a surface.

By emitting into secondary nParticle objects we'll create the illusion of insects falling, or taking off from, that surface. Creation and runtime expressions, along with noise and ramp nodes, will be used to build an end user friendly control system that will govern all aspects of particle behavior including birth, death, emission rate, and movement.

1. Introduction and project overview

2. Moving nParticles across a goal surface

3. Restricting the emission area with a ramp

4. Using a Noise node to simulate random movement

5. Creating a control object for the crowd system

6. Adding an emission rate and global speed control

7. Building basic geometry instancing for nParticles

8. Creating targets for instancing

9. Adding instanced geometry to the nParticle system

10. Controlling forward alignment

11. Aligning instances with the goal surface's normal

12. Emitting into a secondary nParticle object

13. Adding an Instancer node to the second nParticle object

14. Transitioning the aim world up vector to match world space

15. Controlling which nParticle object to emit into

16. Using a ramp to drive the conditions of particle emission

17. Controlling the birth and flight zone ramps

18. Adding controlled randomness to our particle emission

19. Transferring the crowd system to a new surface

20. Finishing the crowd transfer tool

21. Applying the crowd system in a shot

22. Preventing collisions and caching the simulation

23. Rendering the shot

24. Compositing the shot