Animating A School of Fish

[Eric Sanderson]

So what exactly are you working with here? Multiple layers youve script pick-whipped to a null? If so have you tried just parenting the objects to the null and just putting a wiggle on the position and rotation of the objects?

[Kevin Camp]

following what eric suggested, and not knowing exactly what you have already, you might try using the null and fish layers in a ‘follow the leader’ like method…

apply 2 slider effects (expression controls>slider control) to the null. enter a value of say 1 for the first slider and 10 fo the second.

apply this expression to a fish layer’s position (this was taken from motionscript .com:
leader = thisComp.layer(‘Null 1’); // this needs to be your null layer
freq = leader.effect(‘Slider Control’)(‘Slider’);
amount = leader.effect(‘Slider Control 2’)(‘Slider’);
leader + wiggle(freq,amount) – position

now, select the position porperty that has this expression, choose edit>copy expression only. then select all your fish and choose edit>paste.

now all you fish should ‘swim’ or ‘swarm’ around your null layer as it move around. you will most likely need to change the slider values to get closer to the effect you are looking for, but those sliders will control the whole school of fish.

for rotation, unless you want them to follow the null’s rotation, you could try a simple wiggle expression for the fish’s rotation. if you wanted to loosely follow the null’s rotation, you could use a similar expression as above…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

the last line should read like this:
leader.position + wiggle(freq,amount) – position

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i played around with this a bit and found that making all layers 3d (including the null) and setting the fish to auto orient along path (select the fish, choose layer>transform>auto orient, choose along path), then set orientation (rotation) for the fish to 270,90,0 (well, my fish was vertical, your orientation may be a bit different) made a fairly good school of fish…

my slider values were, 1 and 100 and my null’s position was a wiggle expression:
wiggle(.4,200)

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Cutter Johnston]

THANK YOU!!! for the script and replies. I will hammer this home today and post the URL soon after. I really appreciate the assistance.

Cutter