What is the best way to naturally animate hundreds objects?

Question

I'm currently working on an animation consisting of 200 objects (spheres) for a drone show. I was wondering what is the correct way to naturally animate all the objects when transitioning from a formation - or "shape" - to another, as I'm still struggling to understand if I'm following the correct way.

I've achieved a similar result by either manually keyframing and animating each row individually, thus manually simulating the "natural" movement - or by making each horizontal row follow an individual path. Unfortunately, as you can imagine, both methods are quite time consuming as I have to work on 200 or more objects one by one.

I've thought about the possibility of simulating and animating a cloth in 0 gravity and then snapping and constraining each object to the vertices of the cloth to follow its movement, but I'm not sure how to achieve this or if it is actually possible.

For similar "natural" effects, snapping and "pinning" the spheres to animated particles could also do the work, but again I don't have enough experience on Blender to know if this is possible to achieve.

If attached a simple .blender animation with 200 objects if you wanna check how it works or if you wanna try messing with it.

Answer 1

What I think you're asking is to have the spheres (drones) "morph" from one shape to another. For this you can use Shape Keys.
The basic premise here is to use a mesh as a particle emitter, emitting particles from it's vertices. Then morph the shape of the vertices using shape keys.

A simple example is as follows:

Add a cube, give it a subdivision surface modifier set to simple and apply it, this creates a bunch of vertices to use.
Add a particle system to the cube, set like so:

Having a slightly more number of particles than the objects number of vertices.

Add a sphere and move it out of the way/hide it, this will be what the particles will be shown as. Set the instance object in the particle system to the sphere and scale it to suit.

Next, add a shape key, this will create the base key that all the next keys will be based on.

Now you have a starting point.

Next, in my case I've simply added a cast modifier to the cube to change it to a sphere, but you can move any vertex to any location at any frame to get the same result. After adding the modifier, apply it as a shape key

Now in the shape keys tab, with your timeline set to frame 1 set a keyframe on the value of the new shape key

Then move to a new frame, say frame 50 and set the value to 1.000 and add another keyframe.

Now your cube should morph into a sphere taking the particles with it.

You could even use a shrinkwrap modifier to wrap one model to another and apply that as a shape key, being drones though this might cause all manner of crashes, but that's a problem for a different day 😁

For a bit of a simple crash course on Shape Keys I found this a good starting point all3dp.com/2/blender-shape-keys-simply-explained/

Happy Blendering!