Crowd Node Feature Set

I began to brainstorm possible features for the tool, as well as a base set of crowd nodes that involves positioning or moving an agent, e.g. seeking, or path finding

Ui Prototype 2

After testing the ui to make sure what i had worked, i began to add some extra features that will be needed when some nodes have been made

I added a tabbed view ready to hold the buttons for nodes, as well as a description and attribute panel that currently do nothing at all

UI Prototype

A prototype of the UI and how it may link nodes together

Next thing to do is think of a base feature set for the crowd nodes

GUI Research

As I'm looking to have this based on a node based GUI, ive began looking to QT to see what is has to offer, and i found that it has the QGraphicsView and QGraphicsScene along with a list of "QItems" that can be drain inside it which can make up my node graph.

Next I'll begin trying to prototype a UI out of these classes

Qt Links

QGraphicsScene - http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qgraphicsscene.html
QGraphicsView - http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qgraphicsview.html
QGraphicsItem - http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qgraphicsitem.html

Gantt Chart

Put together a gantt chart to get an idea of how long each step in the project may take, as well as help keep track of whats done

Brainstorm for Crowd Tool

So after reading the Steering behaviors paper and Craig Reynolds other paper on "boids" I began to brainstorm what a Crowd tool may need in Maya and this is what came out

Boids Link - http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

Steering behaviours

While researching crowd behaviour I came across Craig Reynolds paper, "Steerin forces for autonomous characters".  In the paper he outlines methods for breaking up crowd behaviour into separate phenomena

Interesting stuff - http://www.red3d.com/cwr/steer/

Current Crowd Tools

A list of other Crowd tools for maya that I need to research

Golaem - http://www.golaem.com/content/products/golaem-crowd/overview
MiArmy - http://www.mayacrowd.com/
MASSIVE - http://www.massivesoftware.com/

Softimage also has an ICE based system called CrowdFX - http://xsisupport.com/category/ice-crowdfx/

Nodes nodes nodes

Been looking at the nodes in houdini and ice and the main thing I noticed they included that maya has none of are logic nodes...if.... For.... While etc so these are nearly definite include

Also they have all the common nodes for emitting and adding forces to particles but none that are specifically for a crowd

Node Fx

So I've decided it's defiantly going to be a visual node based system like houdini's VOPs,  this way I handling data seems very efficient and easy to manipulate

I just need to research what nodes would be essential for a base library as well as narrow down the focus from just a particle tool for maya to something. More solid

Mel is slooow

So I had a play with the crowd tool I made and it's fun to get this goin again but I've noticed it's super slow when handling more than 100 agents, this makes me think a python alternative may be just as slow so time for some tests

Ideas

So to start I'm thinking about creating a node ui that can do something in maya

Main ideas are for crowd control and a way of controlling particles easier in maya

Others include maybe a tool for transferring particle sims between apps

A crowd control too for making armies of agents similar to my 2nd year project