IZation Labs

There’s an extremely well written book, one of my personal favorites, entitled “Prey“. The author, Michael Crichton, passed away not too long ago, but he is the well known author of books such as The Terminal Man, Congo, Timeline, Airframe, and Jurassic Park. His book Prey focuses on nanotechnology and evolution, which, since reading the book, has strongly drawn my attention.

In Blender, the particle physics system lets you simulate and control the movement of many small agents in a physics system. You can make them react to gravity, you can make them explode like sparks off of the end of a gun, or even use them to simulate smoke and fire.

In this instance, I made use of Boids. The boids system is similar to the kind of system referenced in Prey, the agents in the simulation are given a predator/prey relationship. The predators will attack and ‘eat’ the prey. The basics of creating such a system can be found here. After much tweaking and rendering, here is one of the video results of the predator prey interactions.

One last thing. Things had become out of control on the forums, and in the process of resetting it, users and posts were lost. We’ve basically started over, so if you had an account you WILL have to re-register. A clean slate is what was needed though, so here’s hoping things go smoother the second time around.

Cheers!

Lace