LogInMomen Ebba shared a breakdown of his R&D project.
Senior Crowd Simulation Artist Momen Ebba, who often experiments with custom tools and simulation techniques, introduced a new project aimed at making archer crowds fire arrows in a realistic way.
Momen shared some details, explaining the first challenge was generating arrows within the same Crowd DOP network, which was crucial for allowing the arrows to physically interact with the environment. This interaction was essential for triggering effects like enemies ragdolling or switching to a "die" animation upon impact.
Momen began with a Mixamo archer, rigged a crossbow and arrow, and added custom animations so the archer could pull an arrow from a bag, load it, and reset it. The key part, however, was that instead of animating the arrow shot itself, he instanced an arrow every time one was fired and used an RBDPackedObject to simulate it within the same DOP network. This allows the arrow to hit enemies and trigger their reactions, all procedurally, within the same crowd DOP network.
The next challenge was figuring out how the archer knew where to aim. Using VEX, Momen dynamically rotated the lower back joint to adjust the aim both horizontally and vertically. For horizontal rotation, he calculated the angle between the archer's direction and the target, and for the vertical angle, he leveraged physics. As the developer explained, he applied the projectile motion formula to determine the correct launch angle based on the distance to the target, gravity, and the arrow's initial speed.
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