Ant Swarm behaviour

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Comment by Arie-Willem de Jongh on January 6, 2012 at 8:58am

Hey Marie-Noël!

Thank you for your interest! I did some research about swarm logic a while ago, the thing is that it is done in Processing (www.processing.org). I dont know if you are familiar with this piece of software? I can tell you that it is really awsome, its free, open-source, tons of tutorials, libraries and features. Only the forum of processing is not as helpfull as this one :). So prepare spending a lot of time figuring stuff out by your own. 

Grasshopper is by nature not made to make animations. The good thing is that there is a plugin for grasshopper called gHwol (http://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/ghowl) to import geometry from another software real-time into grasshopper (for instance processing to grasshopper). 

This was initially my idea, to port my processing sketch to grasshopper, but I´m kind of burried in work at the moment :S. Some day this might happen I hope :) 

I would advise you to take a look at these websites, they helped me a lot figuring out swarm logic:

http://www.shiffman.net/teaching/nature/steering/

http://www.learningprocessing.com/

These two are from Daniel Shiffman, this guy is a awesome with processing and he shares most of his sketches. I started here with my sketch. Also the book, learning processing is a must if you want to learn the program. He explains the software really well and step by step for dummies.  I just spend a couple of sundays with a beer doing his examples.

So in short, i would not use grasshopper to research in swarm logic but another sofware (like processing or cynder, openframeworks etc.) It is possible in grasshopper, but you would need to write a custom VB/python script. A friend of mine has done it I think. But it is buggy and slow... In my sketch there are around 200 agents and around 10000 pheromones (the dots) all reacting to each other and to the height field. And still the framerate is pretty decent. Forget this in grasshopper.

I hope my info was helpfull, if you need anything else just let me know!

Good luck with your research!

Comment by Marie-Noël Chouinard on January 4, 2012 at 12:59pm

I really like your video.

I've been looking around to start working on swarm logic to use as a model to urban development, but since I've been working with grasshopper for just a few months, I don't really know where to start... Would it be possible for you to put an image of your definition as a base to work with?

Thanks

Comment by Nay Soe on November 21, 2011 at 1:57am

very cool