Look, up in the sky, it's a Boid!

Well, being under the waves doesn't mean no building for me :) Good Lord, no, I might end up socializing or some such. So instead, I decided to play with Boids.

What on earth is a Boid? Ms. CoyoteAngel Dimsum mentioned it to me the other day, and showed me this link to a fun discussion about them:
http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

Basically, they are what the animation industry uses to model fish schools and bird flocks. The basic algorithm (if I may use such a word in public) has each creature heading towards a point exactly midway between the two nearest other creatures. Then if it collides, it bounces in exactly the opposite direction.

A bit of head scratching and searching later, I found out (fortunately for my math challenged brain) that a few years back, Mr. Apotheus Silverman had created an LSL script replicating the basic Boid model.

A bit of tweaking later, I added it to a few sculpted fish and created a "Fish School Rezzer", here displaying the Water Only mode in the cool lagoon of Lionsgate:



In the spirit of the capitalistic age in which we find ourselves ;), I will be putting these rezzers out for sale soon at the Carriage House.