THE SWARM - a flock of bees …

// after DL and un-zip, install in Movies/Motion Templates/Generators //

another ‚left-over‘ from some school project:
The task was to create a swarm of bees from the schools own bee-keepers, chasing a naughty teacher. Somehow, we didn’t manage to tame the real bees (aside the fact, in winter the bees are sleeping), so I made this lil’ generator:

To create a ‚3D blob of bees‘ I stacked three layers of particle animations together, each 90° rotated. The particles = just dots create the ‚chaos‘, and to make it a swarm, I apply the Underwater filter to masks …



That way, the swarm can fly towards you and doesn’t get flat, although just a 'plane', or 3 planes....

On launch, there is this huge magenta circle: this is the basic motion path, the swarm is flying. You can make it bigger or smaller, and tilt (rotate x-axis) it. Finally you can tell the bees to fly forward=clockwise, or backwards. When all adjustments are done, uncheck Circle Path Visible.



When you like to make the bees fly other manoeuvres, UNcheck the motion-path box and apply in the Video-tab of this Generator any key-frames you like. Don’t forget, you can size the Swarm (to create the illusion of depth), and rotate it.

At www.freesound.org/search/?q=bees
you find some really impressive swarm sound files…..
It is just a cloud of dots - bu with the right audio is … The Flying Buzzing Terror... :woohoo:


Feel free to customize this effect, post your improvements here

Enjoy Movie Making!

You know what would be cool? Since this is an emitter, make this a custom DriveX template, so you can have the bee swarm track to something in the video, and interact realistically.

BenB wrote: ....make this a custom DriveX template, so you can have the bee swarm track to something in the video, and interact realistically.

Nice idea! … tracking a running person, and The Swarm follows him… :evil:

I'm a fan of coremelt, TrackX, SliceX on my platters, but unfortunately no DriveX at hand… 'just for hobby' not within budget, for our school project, a handful of keyframes did it ...

I have to admit: it's mostly the SOUND which makes it 'look' realistic. Without, it is just a cloud of dancing dots :lol: . In an earlier version of that plug-in, the emitter was a realistic photo of a bee.... but in 99% of usage, a simple dot does it.