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Bats


marQiemarQ

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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

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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

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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! :)

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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?

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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.

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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... ;-)

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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

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