I always have grand visions for my IRTC project and bite off more than I
can chew. I spend 2.5 months on a new fancy algorithm and not enough
time fine tuning textures, etc.   Please find enclosed a video of my
algorithm for a series of particles that intelligently negotiate a city
based on an isosurface of the cells pattern.

Problems:
1) Use of a step function in an isosurface leads to bandings on the side
of the "steps" which appears especially unattractive in an animation.
Increasing the max gradient helps but also increases render time with
practically a diminishing rate of return.

2) Negotiation of square cubes is inherently more difficult than say
keeping particles apart from each other or negotiating an extremely
smooth, rolling ground.   The problem is that I designed a "city" with a
lot of places where particles can get trapped in a dead end.  The
particles simply look to see if the closest surface is to its right or
left and steers accordingly.  If you come into a situation where two
cubes touch in a corner, it's really hard to get out of it.

Of course, the trick with this is always graceful negotiation of near
misses.  Any bloke could make it instantaneously transport itself a
billion units from the nearest object.  I guess those using other
software packages would just buckle down and ascribe a bunch of spline
points they defined by hand.  Because pov *could* do this more
intelligently, I spend manmonths trying  to do so, possibly showing I'll
never make a good professional animator.  But then again, for how many
people's hobbies is there even the hint of making dought at it?

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