Animated bird flocks tutorial and sample 2021-03-04

I know, it is a car sim but maybe if we add to it alongside Sol's excellent weather system a few flocks of moving birds it will be even more enjoyable. So I went searching for free images of silhouettes to compile a flock and try it out. Sure is easy to find them when the goal is to place many small various silhouettes in a texture. So after a few paste and merge of layers in PShop it looked like i have a banner to fly proud


Then the mesh - has to be scaled to the right dimension for the track and distance from the road, positioned in the line of sight but not to obstruct some more important stuff. Best to be in contrast with the horizon and clouds. Also good places are lone trees in the fields where the real birds like to party. Technically each flag mesh consists of two parallel planes facing away from each other


The diffuse texture from PShop has to be saved with transparency and mip maps


KsEditor is next - edit of the material and the transparency


Better not to cast shadows as in testing they appear static. And of course, LOD_OUT has to be "0" so the flock remains visible at great distances.

That way in an hour I have a proof of concept and a challenge for you - make more and better flocks for the many good tracks and weathers that we have in Assetto. They may be used as permanent for the common birds or even as dynamic objects for fine shaped flocks of migratory birds that cross the sky slowly and majestically. There is an advantage that such flocks work even on vanilla AC and don't rely on CSP code.

The example that I present with this is for a new track I like a lot

To install this place the "flags_s.kn5" into the track's folder.
To include the model from this resource use
to add in "models_full.ini" from the track's folder "..\content\tracks\wicklow_m\"

To see the birds you either drive to the top or fly there with free cam (F7).
To change the movement in the flock you may use the
for the "ext_config.ini" that is in "..\content\tracks\wicklow_m\extension\"

Enjoy!