What was all that stuff about locomotion and in place animation? A few things to expand on there. Look in the geo spreadsheet, note that its a single point (ie, its a packed prim), and if you swap to the primitives tab and look at the intrinsics, find agentclipnames, you'll see it has a clip named 'walk'. If you hit play now, you'll see the biped happily walk away. Set frame range to 'use specific', the start and end to be 1 and 25, enable 'apply clip locomotion', reload button to bake.Locomotion section, enable 'convert to in place animation', set locomotion node to point to the hips of the mocapbiped3 (so the path will be /obj/walk/Hips).Set clip name and current clip to 'walk'. Set the input type to 'Character Rig', set the Character Rig parameter to /obj/walk. Make a new geo container, dive inside, make an agent sop.Disable in-place animation, make note of the number of frames (its 25 frames), turn off its display flag. Create a mocapbiped3, set animation type to 'walks and turns', rename the obj node 'walk'.Here's a simple example to make a walking agent: For initial simple testing we'll keep it all in memory and 'live', and swap to a on-disk workflow later. Similar to a packed primitive, it's a self contained node that can treated as a single point, but it includes geo, a skeleton, animation clips, animation metadata, and a few other things.įor performance when working with big crowds it's assumed all those sub elements are baked to disk.
The building block of crowds is a packed agent. As such, you can dive in with shelves, but I would suggest having a reasonable understanding of the above topics first before getting into crowds. But as is my style, I wanted to understand these at a more fundamental level, and I assume if you're reading this, you do too. 23 Locomotion from cycles locked to the origin, a better wayĬrowds covers the most ground of any Houdini system:Ĭonsidering how complex it is, it's amazing SideFx could make a one-click shelf preset and it mostly works.22 Locomotion from cycles locked to the origin.17 Bonus lazy tip: use the default mocapbiped names.10 Add variation and forces to crowd simulation.7 Bonus feature: Agents aim along 8 Bonus bonus: mixamo agents with variable clip speeds and offsets.6 Add foot locking to terrain adaptation.