Birds On A Wire

[mrwolfy]

I want to create the effect of birds flying onto a wire, then flying away.

I was specifically thinking of using particles, perhaps with a goal of the wire, to animate the flock. No luck yet getting a good result.

I know there are a lot of ways to do it. Any links to tutorials, or suggestions?

Thanks ,

W

[vikash-kumar--7]

I had a similar animation of a birthday banner where the letters dropped down and were caught by a string.  After experimenting with other methods I ended up turning everything into nCloth and using point to surface constraints to connect the nCloth object to the nCloth string.  I was able to get the string to react well to the weight of the objects this way--probably the main issue you'll run into.  Other methods (dynamic hair or softbodies) are hard to constrain to or don't react to mass other than as collisions--I just ran into limitations.

A useful trick to speed and clean up nCloth "string" is to make it out of a low res poly object just to get the general string motion.  Then pick one lengthwise edge loop of the nCloth object and use Convert-->Poly Edge to Curve.  This give you a clean nurbs curve that moves like nCloth which you can then use as an extrusion guide for a nurbs circle to produce higher res string.  You render that nurbs surface and hide the low res ncloth object. 

It's a decptively tricky animation.  Good luck!