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I have a single animation of an ant walking across a plane and I'd like to use that as the base for a larger animation with hundreds of them spawning from a central point and walking outward in various directions away from that point. Think about ants emerging from a small ant hill and spreading out from that point.

I'm relatively new at this so I'm looking for the optimal way to do something like this without having to individually animate every single ant to move in a random vector away from the spawn point. I have spent a few hours fiddling with particle systems to see if that might suit my purpose. I managed to spawn particles that are instances of my ant collection, but I have been unable to figure out how to control the path of the particles to the degree that I'd need for such an animation.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

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    $\begingroup$ Search for "blender birds" on the internet. There is such a thing in other 3D software that I can't mention that allows you to create such behavioral simulations. $\endgroup$
    – james_t
    Commented Sep 2, 2022 at 3:30
  • $\begingroup$ Thank you, I will definitely search for that. Much appreciated. $\endgroup$
    – ChevCast
    Commented Sep 2, 2022 at 5:17
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    $\begingroup$ You could also search for "blender boids", this way you avoid most of the bird modelling tutorials ;) $\endgroup$
    – Gordon Brinkmann
    Commented Sep 2, 2022 at 5:49
  • $\begingroup$ I found a flock of birds tutorial and it was perfect. Thanks so much! Also I feel dumb for going over almost every inch of the particle system, seeing "boids" and going "huh, weird" and then going right on past it. smh lol $\endgroup$
    – ChevCast
    Commented Sep 2, 2022 at 14:12
  • $\begingroup$ @Chev It would be great to know how you did it because your particles seem to have several goals, maybe write an answer? $\endgroup$
    – moonboots
    Commented Sep 3, 2022 at 9:36

1 Answer 1

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It looks a bit toxic, but this might be of interest to you....

enter image description here
Here you can see the video

And of course, you can push it to the limits and make your GPU glow if you want:

enter image description here

With this setup you can actually use any shape for an ant hill.

For the sake of simplicity, I used the same shape in this example with which I implemented the individual ant trails.

At the beginning I use the top surface of a cylinder (with sufficient subdivision):

enter image description here

Then move the points with a Noise Texture:

enter image description here

Using the nodes Shortest Edge Paths and Edge Paths to Curves (available since Blender 3.3!) I convert the mesh into individual curves and trim them:

enter image description here

I can then conveniently time the trim of the curves:

enter image description here

Not only from one point, but also from another point:

enter image description here

This way I get the necessary lines, which I then only have to divide into points:

enter image description here

Ants can then be instantiated at these points or whatever.

You can control the distances between the points, the start point and end point of the curve, as well as the speed and many other things...

Of course this is only an example and you would have to adjust some things here, but it could be a good starting help for you.

The nodes are a bit more extensive than usual, but it's not exactly an easy task:

enter image description here


(Blender 3.3+)

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