Uni Demos

Links and embedded Vids
Links - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLueK6qy2GjWcAKwbihnmM70YDBXBuRky3

Vids - Animation

Global Forces

Tool Setup

Eval

Tool Eval

For the majority of effects this tools will be able to manage, but when colliding with hard objects, like a wall the force on the agents get a bit erratic and can the results make the end look like it cant find a direction to face

The python tools work very well with the Node Editor and making the switch has allowed me to easily incorporate all of Mayas nodes into the system. or even other peoples own nodes.

The PP attributes were a failure, and i think would need a whole new node to replace the PP attribute system, and maybe specialize to to only fit the crowd systems needs

Demos

So Without the battle node, the tool is still successful in being able to generate and maneuver and generate a crowd system, that can interact with other agents in order to avoid interpenetration as well as collide with geometry.

FAR FAR too slow

So i implemented the updating of the attributes functions as Mel commands, and the results were so slow i want even able to produce 10 frames of the animation.  Each frame took at least 2 minutes to calculate only 100 and i expect this is from all of the string concatenation for the command as well as the command itself being slow to execute as Mel.

I'm going to have to cut this feature from the tool as i was unable to find a solution that was within my time constraints.

Python Tools UI

Finally created a UI to accommodate all of the functions needed to setup the crowd systems as well as the tools created for the setups like the animation exporter and Attribute manager

Last attempt at the attributes functions

Ive found yet another method that may be possible to keep the PP attributes updating, its possible to call mel commands from the node so this is another "hack" around the problem but may be the only solutions, before testing it out, i expect this is going to be far too slow to be worth using.

May have to drop the battle node

Having real problems working with these PP attributes, it seems Mayas particle system may not have been the best solution for agents,  there are so many things that are common to other Applications that are part of their particle systems that Maya just hasn't used

I have had to resort to some "messy" hacks to resolve a couple of the issues, one of the main  things i didn't want to have to do was use a script-job, but this is the case when resetting the simulation, all of the P attributes revert to 0 rather than the initial value which i think may be related to the particles never being born as an initial state is used.