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.

Found the problem...

The problem with setting the per particle attribute was that is only affect the current frame in the simulation.. When a frame finishes computing, if the attribute was not set during that frame, it would revert back to its default. stopping any changes i had made to the PP attributes during the simulation.

IndexPP was the only attribute not affected because it is updated on every frame while attributes like aggression and isAlive may only be updates 5-6 times through a simulation.

Python Tools updated and more failed tests...

i needed to update the python tools to allow for the PP attribute connects to be accomplished without the need to drag all of the connections so i created a few functions to automate these tasks

I also tested the functions now the nodes are setup and only the indexPP attribute seems to be getting set, as the animations are updating, but the other attributes are not.  The output from debugging the plugin shows that the commands are being called, but not with the correct values.

Animation Controller

Created the node that will control which index of the animation caches will need to be next.  It accepts the lengths of each cycle and the current index of each particle system from the "Battle Node"

Updated Battle Node

updated the battle node to accept the inputs from the particle systems- Field data and PP Attrs

setPerParticleAttribute Trial

So ive managed to set up the setting of the attributes in the battle node by using MDagPaths to find the particle systems and passing this to an MObject to store.  From there i was able to call the functions to try and set the attributes.

New method for setting attributes

Trying out a new method for setting the attributes.  The MFnParticleSystem class has 2 functions for getting and setting attributes by accepting the particle systems as MObjects and the data as arrays, so ill try this next and see if it works

Api Seems very outdated?

While trying to set up the battle node, ive found that they do not make it easy to set the per particle attributes properly, so far other than create a particelAgeMaper node for every attribute i want to compute i don't think its possible to edit the PP attributes without MEL

Python Tools

Recently updated the python tools so setups within the node editor are easier to make and to add the PP attributes

The Battle Node

Until now all of the forces have been affecting the forces globally, and the PP attributes only affected these forces.  This battle node will determine what happens when two oppsong crowds meet as well animations need to be played next

Basic Animation in place

Here is the outcome of a simulation just trying out the different animations, no forces used, i just let the animations cycle to set what variety could be achieved

Some Animations

Made some animations ready for incorporating into the crowd sim, here are a few