Flocking question

[iGeek]

I'm making an animation of a bacteriophage attacking a cell for biology. At one point, the cell's nucleus needs to start spewing "baby" bacteriophages. I've tried, but I can't seem to get a flock to work. Every time I try, the swarm/birds flock just sits there and doesn't display any models. I was wondering if anyone here could help? I need to finish it by tomorrow morning. I'm including the model and a clip. If you're messing with the model, open the Cell model, select the "For Hiding" group, and press Hide. This will hide the front of the cell so you can see what you're doing. In the final animation, the front of the cell becomes transparent as the bacteriophage lands. Anyway, around frame 5:20, I want the nucleus to look like it's spewing more bacteriophages, and eventually the cell will explode (ie get bigger and then go transparent). How can I get this to work? I'll post the video as soon as it's done doing a quick render...

thanks,

-Zev

Bacteriophage.prj

[iGeek]

Here's the movie. I want the flock to start at frame 5:20ish

bacteriophage.mov

[nyahkitty]

-Go to the menu bar at the top of Hash A:M

-Tools

-Options

-Rendering

-check to make sure Particles/Hair is marked as ON

 

Also, if you adjusted any of the settings on the swarm, make a new swarm model and then compare the settings between the two to see if there's a hint of why you're having a challenge with the swarm you modified.

 

I am not seeing the virus model showing up in the swarm, but I added a new swarm and now the instances are visible regardless of if the swarm model itself is active or not. Strange.......

 

At any rate, if you solve this, all the other settings should be keyframable in order to make the baby viruses fly out.

[iGeek]

Yeah, that did it. Thanks! Now I just have to see if I can figure out how to get them to not dislpay at the beginning. I may just have them all be in the nucleus to start with, then pop out and grow. Maybe also opacity...

-Zev

[iGeek]

I've messed with it a bit. I can't get the to stay inside the falloff radius and then expand with it later. grrr. here it is, see if you can figure out what I missed... thanks

-Zev

Bacteriophage.prj

[iGeek]

Here's the final model I'm gonna render. I'm thinking like 320x240, then post it online and pick it up at school. Thanks for all the help. In the end I decided to just use paths, then bake the actions so I could delay them. Is there a way to get a path constraint to start at a certain time???

-Zev

Attack.zip

[iGeek]

I've posted the animation at http://www.avnertheeccentric.com/zev/virus/

Now I'm rerendering with 16 pass motion blur, just for myself.

-Zev