The aggregate Motion of a flock of birds, a herd of land animals, or a school of fish is a beautiful and familiar part of the natural world.
But this type of complex motion is rarely seen in computer animation.
This paper explores an approach based on Simulation as an alternative to scripting the paths of each bird individually. The simulated flock is an elaboration of a particle systems, with the simulated birds being the particles.
The aggregate motion of the simulated flock is created by a distributed behavioral model much like that at work in a natural flock; the birds choose their own course. Each simulated bird is implemented as an independent actor that navigates according to its local perception of the dynamic environment, the laws of simulated physics that rule its motion, and a set of behaviors programmed into it by the "animator." The aggregate motion of the simulated flock is the result of the dense interaction of the relatively simple behaviors of the individual simulated birds.
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REYNOLDS, Craig W., 1987. Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model. In: Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. 1 August 1987. p. 25–34. [Accessed 21 February 2023]. SIGGRAPH ’87. ISBN 978-0-89791-227-3. DOI 10.1145/37401.37406.