Murmuration is a flocking system which attempts to capture the aesthetic qualities of starlings in flight.

This flocking system has been reworked many times over the last two decades.

Early versions were CPU-bound boid sims that could only handle 1000 objects before losing interactive framerates. Newer versions pushed the flocking logic to the GPU and I was able to get realtime simulations with up to 40,000 objects. (A friend recently ported my flocking logic to some fancy compute shaders on a modern GPU and was able to achieve 30+ fps with over a million flockers.)

The most recent versions were rebuilt in Houdini and feature flocker counts between 200,000 and 500,000. Videos of these versions are below.

Over the years, our research and development in the field of flocking systems have resulted in exciting collaborations with esteemed institutions and corporate clients such as the Wing Luke Asian Museum, McLeod Residence Gallery, Facebook, the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and Adobe, among others. As we advance our research, we continually explore novel applications for our system, with more developments to come.