Flocking logic

Shark cam from flight404 on Vimeo.

Pretty quickly, I got a good looking swimming tuna but then right down the rabbit hole I went. 

Robert Hodgin's write-up of making an animation of a marine boil-up (an underwater tornado-shaped feeding frenzy) is one of the best things I've read in ages. He captures not only the effect he was aiming for, and the lengths and compromises he had to go to to try to achieve that, but also the nervousness of working at a distance for a client (Auckland Museum, for their recently opened Moana exhibition) you don't have direct contact with.

It's a beautiful piece of work, even if you don't know what flocking logic, Cinder C++ or multithreading are. Highly recommended.

(The video above shows a piece of test work, in which Hodgin used a pre-made model of an Airbus 350 to stand in for a diving gannet.)