Animate on Collision/Event?

[Abigor]

Hey everyone... more thoughts rolling around in my head along with all the crowd stuff iv been thinking about lately...

Is it possible to trigger animation by an even or collision?

e.g: I have my crowd of people with 2 .mdd animations applied to each person. mdd1 says clap, mdd2 says stop clapping and sit down. So could I let .mdd1 run for however long, and have .mdd2 starter/triggered by a collision object set to event?

The purpose of this would be to use a number of collision events passing through the crowd at different times, thus starting the new animation of the crowd of people and different times. That way they dont all clap in unison, and sit in unison.

And I guess this goes for animation beyond just .mdd's. Thats just currently the method im using to animate my crowd. But if it could be applied to keyframed animation, or bones animation, etc, that would be wonderful!

Just a though... any ideas?

...Oh, and before anyone suggests Celshader's perl script for randomizing .mdd files, I'm already aaalllll over that. I was just thinking aloud on this one! :)

[jeremyhardin]

not directly as such, no.

another way to automate it is to use ClothFX to load it rather than MD Plug, and use the motion size option.

Motion size can be enveloped, so it can be tied to motion modifiers or expressions, and give almost the same result as a start_by_collision.

Obviously your motion would need to be repeating or occilating, and you'd still be coming in to the middle of a motion. But hey, it'd be a smooth transition, at least.

[Abigor]

Wow, interesting solution! Would that require calculation to work? Or is it like MD_plug where it will instantly give scrubbable playback of an animation without need to calculate. If it needed calcutation, on a crowd with 20,000, it might take, ummm... a bit of time, hehe.

But a cool solution none the less. Thanx Jeremy! :)

[jeremyhardin]

no calculation needed. it will play MDSCAN mdd's just fine.