Adding more flies

I needed to add more flies, so I used the duplicate tool. I found that the animation was carried over to the new object (they were still linked), so when I moved the new one and keyframed it, the other would copy. I found the soloution was to export the fly as an object (only selected). I then imported it straight back in and the keyframes were clear.

I keyframed the fly out of view 1 frame before I wanted it to appear, and then had it suddenly jump into position. Because the movement was so fast it gives the same effect as it would if the object appeared at that frame - which isn't possible in Blender. I made the fly move up towards the man using keyframes - location rotation and then added a particle effect to the fly. I played with the settings, similarly to the previous effect (mother fly orange), but added an explode modifier, this made the object explode and worked with the particle settings. I had to enable emitter in render levels to display the fly in the animation, this was because particles are often used to show something over the top of an already existing object.

I introduced another fly, again appearing and coming 'out' of the mother, I used the same effects and made the animation more 'exciting' by having the flies interact with each other. To keep the fly in view when it rotated I would sometimes have to add keyframes and bring it slightly into view as it was important to always see the action.

I also made the eyes follow the fly, where as before it was only focusing on what the arm was hitting. It was starting to look like a nice little sequence, but I wanted to improve on a few things...

I added a particle effect to the mother fly, so that it seemed to dissolve and that the new flies were taking her place. I tweaked the key framing for the second fly, and also rotated it to make it seemed like the fly was trying to get away. Little touches like this can go to 'improve' the animation so much.

The next thing will be to find some more mocap examples to get my sequence and start bringing it all together.