how to use millipede for flocking?

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Permalink Reply by Panagiotis Michalatos on October 15, 2012 at 8:19am

Hi,

To trace the trails using isosurfaces you need to generate the trails as polylines or other type of curves. Then you need to sample a three dimensional grid [rx x ry x rz] of points that fills the bounding box of the trails and for each point compute the distance to the closest curve [or a weighted average of exponentially decaying distances [exp(-d1^2)+exp(-d2^2) + ....] of the point to all the trails if you want smooth blending between intersecting trails].  

In the end you get just a list of [rx x ry x rz] values V  and the grid resolution as three integers [rx x ry x rz] and connect them to the millipede isosurface component.

This may be slow because if you want high resolution then you will end up with millions of points and calculating all these distances and then the isosurfaces of the corresponding voxels is time and memory intensive. So start with a low resolution [say 25x25x25] and increase gradually depending on your computer's capabilities and desired quality.