Recently there has been a lot of talking and experimentation with flocking in ICE. Kim Aldis and Brad Gabe have both done some neat implementations of flocking, and Phil wrote some impressive compounds early on to deal with not only flocking but similar behaviors like chasing, path/maze navigation and so on.
I found myself joining the bandwagon on my last project where we needed a quickly-constructed tool to handle crowds of flying dragons. It was suprisingly quick (hours not days) to implement a basic flocking system using simple cohesion, alignment and avoidance, as well as some path following and artist-driven steering.
Andy Jones had some great input into dealing with banking and vertical alignment, so I learned a lot making this tool. This is where ICE is at it’s best – rapid development of production solutions on the fly. Below is a result. (The video is intentionally zoomed out, when the project results are public I’ll update the article with more detailed images.)