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Crowd Control


So I'm working on a sequence right now which is a swordfight with 15 "people" against one and its TOUGH... well actually its more like a melee but anyway... work on these shots is SLOW... a couple hours per shot which is LONG for me on this thang... toward the end I have some scenes with like five times as many people as this so I'm going to have to come up with a better technique...

I already tried making a poor manS massive in C4d... I tried putting animated characters in a Cloner and using a step effector to offset the time... proB is it only offsets the animation from the root object and when you have a rigged character animated... theres tons of things nested in the hierarchy that are animated so that technique doesn't work.... also is SLOW.....if you all want them synced it works BUT some variation is best...

I tried putting animated characters in a SplineSpread object as it has a time offset parameter as well but again it can only offset the root animated object... and its SLOW

Hmmm I just got an idea... what if I set all the characters animated properties to be controlled by a time track then used the time offset on that? Hmmm will have to try that tomorrow....

I mean when I say poor mans massive thats what i really mean ^ ^ I'm NOT trying to do any AI stuff... just a group of animated characters that can move over terrain and be guided toward a goal... particles should work in theory BUT when you put characters in an emitter its not long before the app locks up...

If I could program I would make a poor mans massive in C4d ^ ^ Maybe use motion clips and have them triggered by different events giving the character "behaviors" hmmmm modyn collision detection would be nice too...

So I'll keep trying to find a solution... if it just gets too cumbersome I could always come up with a 2d solution... duplicate some crowds in After Effects... I've seen some particular demo's doing crowds... of course they are all 2.5d ya know on cards... I could try the card technique in Cinema as well.... proB what I'll have to do... 50 single poly planes is certainly easier for the app to handle than 50 fully animated characters ^ ^ BUT I'm 3d now.... HATE to go back to that FLAT world of 2.5d... well I'll do what I gotta doES yaLL

Comments

  1. This might sound really stupid, but I know very little about 3d. so

    Is there a way of only animating skeletons and then rendering out individual characters, full model and texture? I know you would have a lot of compositing to do afterwards, but maybe it´ll help you animate faster?

    You could try to animate the main swordsman first full model and the other 15 or more just using skeletons and applying particles to those....

    Like I said, it might be a stupid suggestion but maybe it can help.

    Cheers

    ReplyDelete

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