Fly fight

I had only rendered this as a preview (earlier post), and didn't add the lower half constraints. So I added the IK, track to, and limit rot constraints for hips, upper and lower legs, feet and toes. I had to rotate the foot bones in edit mode like before so that they touched the ground.

I should avoid making the sequence too complicated with a fly being 'dissolved' on every punch attack, so should base it on the previous version; with a fly dodging a punch but getting hit on the next punch. I was really pleased with my previous version of this and like the way the flies take it in turns,1 as if they are avenging their 'friends'. On the final punch I will have the fly drop like before and particles splurge out drifting up to the sky to signify 'the end'.

I imported one more fly and got it to interact with the character by knocking into him and dodging the punches, when it does get hit I used the explode modifier that I used for the other flies, and keyframed loc rot for it dropping down.



The final step was to create the particle effect of mist/end of flies rising up from the floor into the sky. It was frustrating that to get Blender to record the particles I had to play from frame 1, my sequence took at least 3 minutes to get to the final few frames which was what I needed to analyse. I couldn't do this again as it would have taken too long so I opened a new window and looked at what the settings did, I would have to scale up lots because my mocap scenes are so large in the Blender world.

Once I'd found settings I was pleased with I used them in my fly battle scene I put the orange cube, which I used for the particles, at the beginning of the timeline (quicker to see results). I used 40 acc z which made the particles reach the top of the camera but moved a bit fast, 20 didn't reach top and when it fades out (1700 - 1800 last frame) its life of 50 means it travels away for 50 frames which makes it look like the flies drift out of the scene.

The particles would fly up when I put it at the beginning of the scene (1-100) but when I tried it anywhere else on the timeline the particles would not go above the solid shape. I would have to add them separately in After Effects and hope it gave the same effect.

This is when it works at the beginning of the scene, but I feel it moves a bit too fast. By having it on a separate layer I can decide on the speed using the time mapping tool.