CompuServe Messages

Hello Sanford, I saw your message.. >>..intend to animate a flock of bats descending.. I saw something at Siggraph which may be worth trying for your "flock" once you get your bat modeled. I can't quite remember who did it, but one animation consisted of hundreds of walking animals (squid & octopi, I think). Rather than making hundreds of copies of the mesh to animate and render, they created a simple loopable walking animation of one such animal that consisted of just a few frames. They rendered these few frames against a black background, and applied the resulting animation on a "card", a simple flat rectangle, mapped with the equivilant of the 3DS Decal method. They duplicated this card many times and moved a whole crowd of these cards along a roadway. With a little animation playing on each card, the effect was the same as animating many copies of the actual mesh. This may be very easy to do with at least most of your bats, especially if you don't have to worry about shadows for each bat and if the bats were generally going in the same direction. (So perspective wouldn't be a problem) Perhaps some combination of a few bat 'stars' in front of a mob of card-bats would work. JKJ