marQiemarQ Posted May 13, 2009 Share Posted May 13, 2009 This project is my first attempt at instancing geometry onto particles in Houdini. I modeled a low res version of a bat so that the particles coming out of the cave wouldn't be too render intensive. I then, had a higher resolution bat for the foreground bats that pass by. What do you guys think? Bats.mov Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Netvudu Posted May 13, 2009 Share Posted May 13, 2009 There must be something about bats (maybe Batman movies) because I did a similar project a few months ago, and I had a similar problem that your video shows. If you make them flap at the speed they really do it, then they look more like butterflies than bats. I grabbed some real footage for reference and when tried to use that speed, the same thing happened to me...butterflies everywhere. When I slowed down the wings flap it looked much better. As of today I still don Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marQiemarQ Posted May 13, 2009 Author Share Posted May 13, 2009 I experienced the exact same problem with the flapping speed. I don't know what it is, but I'm just fascinated with bats. Like you said, I was inspired by Batman Begins to do this piece. The opening scene where the bats fly across the sunset and form the batman symbol is amazing to me! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael Posted May 13, 2009 Share Posted May 13, 2009 cool... my first reaction is that the bats are too big... they seem very uniform - so as they flap their wings it's hard to tell what is going on... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted May 14, 2009 Share Posted May 14, 2009 I grabbed some real footage for reference and when tried to use that speed, the same thing happened to me...butterflies everywhere. Does the real footage look "better"? Could it have something to do with motion blur samples? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Netvudu Posted May 14, 2009 Share Posted May 14, 2009 Yup. Real footage looked way better. Haven Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rudinie Posted May 14, 2009 Share Posted May 14, 2009 I'm by no means a specialist but the flight path of the bats looks very straight to me. Bats, i think, make very very radical turns when they fly, so they rotate around the axis from head to toe quit radically as well. The flaps are very uniform in your animation as well and i think you could make the flap cycle a little more eratic as well. Hope this helps. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
calix Posted May 14, 2009 Share Posted May 14, 2009 some bats are flapping around 8 to 16 times a second, so maybe the problem is the too constant frequency of the flapping...so the chance is very high, that you have the same image every second frame...maybe you can bring in some randomness into the frequency of the flapping...eg. one second 12 flaps, next second 16 flaps sorry for my bumpy english... ;-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marQiemarQ Posted May 16, 2009 Author Share Posted May 16, 2009 Thanks for all of your feedback. I made the bats a little smaller on this go around. I also found an error with the copy stamping expression. Fixing this improved the bat flap cycle. Before they looked like butterflies as Netvudu mentioned. I think the flaps are a lot smoother and they look more like bats now. I still intend to break the uniformity a little more so that they look more eratic, but what are your thoughts on this version? Bats_Low.mov Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael Posted May 16, 2009 Share Posted May 16, 2009 much better! yeah..a bit more ramdom flight paths will help - bats are crazy! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.