Meanwhile, Joe is working on...

Just quick adjustments the the force fields (turning down turbulence and keying various field's magnitudes) and changes to the custom aim expression/script. Still not convinced on the general behaviour of the butterflies, I think I will write my own flocking system to deal with them. At the current state, they are most useful for long shots and when the butterflies may need to collide with objects due to the use of nParticles. I think creating a custom flocking system will be to mainly provide a more realistic flight behaviour, with less sharp changes of direction which is an artifact of the current solution and also to allow for butterflies to follow and go to certain positions defined by the user. At the current moment I am unsure of how to do such things with nParticles and expressions.

Been trying to simulate a flock/crowd of butterflies using Maya nParticles and instancing a simple animated geometry. So far I had to add a better butterfly pointing vector as the default set is limited, butterflies do not pitch or dive steeply which the most usable default option available, aim by velocity, does. I had to write a custom expression to get the butterfly to get them to fly flatter. Wasn't too pleased with the result at the moment, looks like a mess, especially the flapping which does not relate to the speed or change of direction of the butterflies. Also, as expected, they behave like a bunch of particles, which is random enough for shots such as when they are collecting underneath the umbrella, obviously needs more tweaking for that.