Season 2 : “I’m the Butterfly Wrangler!”

In my most involved season yet I was told “Next season we’re gonna need about 1 million butterflies”. This very quickly evolved into millions and millions.

Each butterfly started off as either a simple or high resolution model. I needed the most bang for your render buck when it came to showing a swarm. I had a sitting, walking around, take off, flying, and landing state. These were all driving by a custom Thinking Particles script I wrote.

My Thinking Particle system consisted of a few artist driven tools. The amount on screen was extremely important. Being able to determine HOW many should be flying in any shot and a shot placed collision object was an important request.

After the main simulation was done it was then passed off to Frost to incorporate the meshing and animation timing. I used linear indexing pulled from the original sim to pick which animations should be used.