Crowds

General

• Foot locking set-up should be done in the agent prep node. For the terrain adaptation to work. Also when you want to isolate some ragdoll to only some parts

• Crowd agents are packed primitivs

• Crowd source have an initial velocity. that’s why they are moving even at rest state.

• Clip on SOP level. State on DOP level.

• Terrain adaption can be within the Crowd Solver or through the Adapt To Terrain

• Agent Clip can contain several motion fbx files

• Agent > Agent Clip > Agent Layer > Agent Prep > Collission Layer > Agent Cache > Configure Joints > Crowd Source

• Agent Prep is for the foot plant set-up

• Houdini includes several useful POP forces created to work with crowds. Nodes of this types have names starting with “POP Steer”.

• Crowd Source Node: Randomzie Initial Velocity is better than Ranomize Initial Heading

• Agent Clip Properties: To make in place animation.

• Change State

• Don’t ever use initial velocity. Just use the locomation to translate the character.

• Grouping of States doesn’t seem to work.

• Gait Speed Paramter is only useful if you are not using locomotion

• Agent Transform Group

• Agent Edit helps on previewing the current agent clip and agent layer.

• Agent Clip Properties edits general parameters of the clip like loop range.

• Agent Clip Transitions

• Adding Metadata

• building an automatic ball control.

  • inherent in agent terrain.

• Need to Set the Start and End of the Clip. Otherwise it won’t loop. So much for locomotion!

• intrinsic: pointinstance transfrom set to 1 by default on agent primitives,.

Rag Doll

• can add pop forces in the ragdoll solver. ragdoll also has motor options to have art direct rag doll

Terrain Obstacle

Workflow

• Building Character
• Creating Crowd
• Set Your Blendshapes
• Setting Transitions
• Corrective Shapes

using crowd system to blend the agent mocap transition.

// setting i@trigger to 1 will enable
// setting i@trigger to 0 will disable
i@trigger = -1;

string handle_path = "op:/obj/geo1/dopnet1:crowdobject1/Geometry";
float clip_len = agentcliplength(handle_path, @id, "standing_up_01");
if ((f[]@cliptimes[0]/clip_len) > 0.65) i@trigger = 1;