I'm an environment artist who knows enough rudimentary animation skills to get by and I've got something that is going to be tedious unless there's a faster solution: I need to animate a bunch of fish just sort of bobbing up and down in the water. What's a fast way to do it that doesn't involve me manually keying each fish…
consider using a particle effect? not sure how complex of motion you need for the individual fish, but you might get what you need with a simple particle generator, with a long particle life and some positional constraints and specify your fish mesh to be used as the particle.
If the fish are all the same, animate one, copy it and then shift the keys in the time line so they bob at different times? If the fish aren't all the same, you can animate a dummy, copy the dummy around and link the different fish to the dummies. You could also animate one, save the animation and load it into the others.…
I have no idea if this could work but it popped in my head. Have a plane (or other mesh) and snap/link/bone/whatever the fishes to some vertices on that mesh. Use a noise animation on the plane, and make a bobbing like animation. If this works, it should be quite nifty because you could change the animation for all fishes…
Yeah, I ended up doing this - there were about 25 fish kind of floating around at different depths setting up any kind of simulation would of taken longer than doing it by hand.
Do you mean bobbing like this in the water? [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXilZbxgBF0"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXilZbxgBF0[/ame] If so, you can also try the attachment constraint in max. If the water is already animated, just attach the fish to the water and set their position, then you can adjust the pivot…