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View Full Version : Can't find answer to Max 8 crowd control system

bonus2003
09-04-2006, 02:13 PM
Ok I am going to try and explain this as best as i can. I am a noob at crowd control, i have really only used it twice. My new project, which also happens to be my final at school, is a scene where i need to use crowd to simulate a futuristic battle with alien creatures. Now the effect that i am going for is a swarm type look with the creatures, seeing as how i have only used non bipedal(sp?) objects with crowd before i am a little confused if this will work or not. The question is can i make and animate a biped with the model skinned and everything and have crowd copy that biped and model and animation many times over. Then apply the crowd behaviors(avoid, seek) to it as well? Keep in mind that these are not standing up type bipeds but more dog like creatures here is a picture of what i will kind of have in the end.

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c358/bildo4/termigaunts.jpg

the middle legs will not be an issue i am going to have them tucked up and not be moving. Any help or in sight into my problem would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

P.S. If you have a better way of doing this other than Crowd please let me know that too!

-B-
bonus2003
09-05-2006, 09:29 PM
Come on guys no one can give me a yes you can do this no you can't answer? Can you modify and animate a biped and then have crowd replicate that movement in every deligate that you make?
PEN
09-06-2006, 11:50 AM
Have you done all the tutorials on crowd in the Max docs? It has been years since I last looked at it but the simple answer to your question is yes you can do what you are asking.
bonus2003
09-06-2006, 12:26 PM
thank you for the direct answer, i truely appreciate it.

-Bill-
salmonmoose
09-06-2006, 01:14 PM
Yes, you can.

However;

You can't show the creatures too close if you used a looped animation, delegates (controllers for crowd objects) don't move at a constant speed, so you will get some foot slide.

If you want to go for a more detailed solution, you could follow the path I used, and use a pre-configured rig, for this purpose, I would suggest CAT (Character Animation Toolkit) as it supports pretty much any character you can think of, and also can stretch walk cycles so feet never slide.

Max's builtin Character studio rig isn't as versatile, I don't recall if it was possible to use the footstep mode, which won't work for you anyhow, as you're not working with a biped character. Also if you use hand animated animations, you need to build lots of them for it to be usable there isn't much animation tweening alowed.

Doing this creates several more issues.

There appears to be a problem with Max's crowd simulation that means simulating more than ~100 characters breaks. The trick is to simulate groups of characters, of around 100 at a time, the first group would be the one that moves nearest the camera, subsequent groups then need to avoid previous group members.

Running that many rigs breaks max. My work around for this was to build a script that loaded the rigged character, told it to follow a delegate, recorded a pointcache for that character, and then deleted the rig (leaving the character's mesh). Beware, detailed characters will create very large point caches, they compress nicely however.

After you've done this for a production, you realise you never want to do crowd simulation in max again ;)
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