Making the Scottish follow the terrain

[Adam H. Stewart]

I'm working on an interactive map for the Blue Disk of Braveheart. I've modelled some terrain for two battles at the moment I have big blocks moving over the terrain to represent the Scottish and English troops. I was working until 4am last night and me head is just a tad fuzzy but I'm trying to remember the best way to get little groups of 3D objects to follow the terrain like troops might. I'll need to have about 20 little figures in each group, the movment doesn't have to be anything too crazy but something a little random would be nice. At the moment I'm using splines with point helpers attached to them to represent the blocks, they roughly follow the terrain. I matched the spline to the terrain by creating dummys on the knots and then using a script to drop it to the surface.
I am sure there is a more efficient way to do all of this -but as I said my brain is clocking a bit slow today and I thought Vray community could do my thinking for me until I get some sleep :]

Thanks as always for you're help

Adam

[percydaman]

hmm...this seems a perfect use for pflow?

[RE:FORM_STUDIOS]

I recently looked into using crowds, and it seems fairly straight forward to get something simple setup. A bigger group like you describe may be alot harder though. Check the max sample files for some crowd simulations over contoured landscapes.

[instinct]

you might wanna take a look at crows it wich is free and seems nice tho i never used it myself

http://www.ifsua.de/crowdit/What_is.html

Regards,
Thorsten

Edit: eeek...just saw it is max8 only...sorry..and safely ignore

[dellis]

I would go with crowd...pretty easy to setup and would give you that random sort of feel.

[Adam H. Stewart]

Thanks a million on the ball as usual - the crowd IT seems very interesting. I just saw that it is max 8 aswell :[ part of me wants to try it anyway - I just like punishing myself :]

I had no idea that biped had a crowd simulation ability - just opened the help file and saw all the little bipeds on the curved landscape - very interesting I'll have to investigate further.

Late last night I came across some turbo training pflow tutorials I forgot about, I haven't had a chance to look at them yet but there is one that is specifically for getting pflow to follow a terrain. I am also just remember that I have a copy of CAT - maybe there is some crowdy stuff in there.

Fun fun

Thanks again for all the help