How does one simulate the behavior of crowds of people inside Maya?
How does one simulate the behavior of crowds of people inside Maya? There are at least two recently released tools that can help you deal with this task. The first one is called Golaem.
The team has just released version 6 of its crowd simulation tool for Maya, with several new tools to give artists greater freedom. The newest version features:
- Character Perception – customize the way in which characters are aware of one another.
- Channel Operators – customize character’s behavior using low level building blocks called Channel Operators. You can use 100 channels to feed a graph of operators, outputting a new character speed and orientation or controlling its animation.
- Control transitions between motions using customizable transitions.
- Emit/Kill behaviors – emit characters (or other agents) from a Golaem Placement Tool or relatively to another character.
- Traffic Behaviors – a new traffic tool that allows users to quickly add traffic. The road network can be drawn from Maya curves and Golaem will automatically create lanes and traffic lights.
The latest version (v5.5) of crowd simulation tool by Basefount Technology features:
- Clone Agents. Clone allows users to build a large number of simple crowds with intuitive method. Especially in stadium, square or terrain, you can fast deploy huge number of actors for simulation and rendering. For dealing with 200K agents in scene, you can get 20X faster in simulation and 100X faster for rendering (currently supports Arnold & V-Ray)
- Direct Logic Engine. With the new engine, you can skip most of the logic setup, and directly build most of logic with simple setup. For example if you want your actors to walk along the road, just tell them “follow the road”. Auto avoid and auto fight logic also added into the engine.
- Up to 2-3 times faster viewport performance
- Support for Redshift