Another small update, I finally got around to re-programming the boids stuff into maya. Its meant learning Python (that I was already touching on at work) and starting to figure the maya ui more but its really good fun

Here are a couple of playblasts showing that I've got the main rules in and some basic collision avoidance. I'm currently adding more features in and working on putting all the options into a popup window in maya. I've got things like 'number of boids' and 'distance between boids' but there are still tons of options to add

Position of boids and obstacles are randomly generated when run and are not movie length dependant (it just loops over the 24 frames/sec):
playblast1

playblast2

and a little bit of the code showing how to create a window with buttons for the maya ui (in python). I might create some basic tutorials for people to have a play with the programming side:
code example

Si