Crowd Simulations

[MoonDoggie]

VRayers,
Is anyone using a crowd sim? I've seen Character Studio's and it is out of the question. Does anyone have a suggestion for a crowd sim (Massive is an option, but integrating it into our vray pipeline is troublesome). I've heard of AI Implant. Any other ideas? Thanks alot.

-Colin

[Da_elf]

automatron is good

[MoonDoggie]

hrm, looks interesting. It says you can only create hundreds of delegates. We need something like thousands.

With it can I import any character model I want? What about biped animation data or will it generate it itself? Rigs? Will the characters interact at all?

[Da_elf]

i havent used it in that way.
it does sound like you need something like massive hehe. how would something like massive work in max? can you export models to max from there?

[MoonDoggie]

massive is actually a stand-alone renderer too. So you actually import your terrain geometry on it and within massive you tell the people to walk on your imported terrain.

Unfortunately, there is only MR support which would mean I would have to setup a MR Lighting solution for every scene with is already lit in 3dsmax.

Ideally a 3dsmax plugin will work best for our needs.

[MoonDoggie]

How do you do it in Automatron? Maybe it'll suit our needs.

[joconnell]

How long is the shot you're doing with it? You can pull off crowd shots with rigged people that are animated on the spot - then you bake the animation into a point cache modifier and use them as particles. Thinking particles has some quite good stuff for this like a map type that can add random colour variation so you can get plenty of variety from a handful of models.

[MoonDoggie]

The crowd sim will be incorporated into our entire pipeline. Particles are a bit limited to do what we are trying to accomplish. Ideally the people semi-interact with each other, to populate entire urban landscape animations we do.

[dellis]

Adam Watkins had some maxscripts that he created, called Mayhem...not sure if he's still working on it or if he would even give it out....might be worth a try though. He would be a good one to talk to about crowd related stuff as well.

[instinct]

CrowdIt seems to be pretty advanced given it is MXS and esp given it is free :P
You might wanna check it out. It looks pretty damn powerful, tho i didnt try it myself so far.

http://crowdit.worldofpolygons.com/

Regards,
Thorsten