massive crowd simulation

[geo_n]

Does anyone have any experience with massive software and crowd simulation? I'm trying to learn it but its all nodes again. nodes in lw, nodes in maya, nodes in massive. too many nodes :help:
And the massive workstation we have is linux. Eeek. I dont personally like linux.
Can hd instance with particles mimic the brain/body simulation of massive?
A grid of streets where particles(people) would be directed with some control and hd instance to render?

[Cageman]

Does anyone have any experience with massive software and crowd simulation? I'm trying to learn it but its all nodes again. nodes in lw, nodes in maya, nodes in massive. too many nodes :help:
And the massive workstation we have is linux. Eeek. I dont personally like linux.
Can hd instance with particles mimic the brain/body simulation of massive?
A grid of streets where particles(people) would be directed with some control and hd instance to render?

Well... you can do limited stuff with particles and HD instance. Pixel Magic did some of that when they worked on Red Cliff.

You can see an interview about those effects here:
http://www.happy-digital.com/instance_interviews.php

EDIT: I belive Mr.Rid mentioned that they did the work for Red Cliff in about 6 weeks... so they really had to hit the ground running to make it happen.

[RebelHill]

No... U cant really mimic waht massive does elsewhere... at first, its original creator, strven regelous, walked away from it, cos he thought it was just gonna be animation cycles tied to a particle system... but then he came up with another idea...

what massive does is sote premade animation cycles, and categorise them... for instance in fight scenes, as agressive bhaviours, cowardly ones, etc, etc... adn these behaviours interplay with one another till a result is reached... ie, one character runs away, or one wins and the other dies. Its basically an AI type of program, so it makes decisions about what a given character is going to do, and plays the appropriate anim cycle for it... the only way to get the same behaviour out of a simple particle system is to go through each "agent" manually, and pick the desired behaviour.

Thats not to say u cant create stunning scenes without something like massive... u just cant automate the input of "life".

[cresshead]

doesn't massive come with any documentation or video tutorials?
for $14K i'd demand a direct phone line to their support!

[walfridson]

Don't forget bugz, flay it ;)

[geo_n]

cageman - I missed that video when promoting hd instance and lw to our Proj. dir. Thanks. He saw the exorcist(?) video but the crucified people don't move.
RebelHill - right, I think its too overkill for what we have to do. I asked if we were going to do a lotr type of crowd sim and the answer was no. So I'm thinking of lw particle system with some control(going up/down slope, turning,etc) and hd instance for render.
cresshead - it comes with everything you want tut/video/manual in a xeon workstation and linux. Running massive is comman line.Lol. And its another node system with some programming. I'm really bad in math and nodes again, my hands are full with learning lw, maya, and reserving brain space for max nodes.:D
walfridson - thanks, I checked it. I'll have to find out how it makes instances in lw and if it can be rendered with hd instance.

crowd sim (http://tinypic.com/r/b85y50/5)
Vid of what we'll be doing but around 10000 people, more detail and closer camera. But no real heavy AI stuff. Just simple cycles.

[cresshead]

what about using xsi's behavior crowd sim or split up the crowd and use an app you c an do smaller crowd sims with and comp it together if they are simpler to manage than massive....or hire a chap who's a known massive guru.

[Cageman]

crowd sim (http://tinypic.com/r/b85y50/5)
Vid of what we'll be doing but around 10000 people, more detail and closer camera. But no real heavy AI stuff. Just simple cycles.

That should be more or less a piece of cake for LW+HD Instance. You may want to check this one out as well:

Pixel Magic uses HD-instance in Good Luck Chuck (http://www.happy-digital.com/instance_interviews.php?videoClips=1)

[geo_n]

what about using xsi's behavior crowd sim or split up the crowd and use an app you c an do smaller crowd sims with and comp it together if they are simpler to manage than massive....or hire a chap who's a known massive guru.

Unfortunately we don't have a xsi license. But I'll check it out to see how it handles crowd sim and instance rendering. My boss said there's maybe 100 massive operators in japan so why not make it 101 including me. Uh yeah:hey:.

[geo_n]

That should be more or less a piece of cake for LW+HD Instance. You may want to check this one out as well:

Pixel Magic uses HD-instance in Good Luck Chuck (http://www.happy-digital.com/instance_interviews.php?videoClips=1)

Checked it out with the red cliff mov, tnx. I'm doing some tests with hd instance right now and present tom to PD.

[Titus]

Does anyone have any experience with massive software and crowd simulation? I'm trying to learn it but its all nodes again. nodes in lw, nodes in maya, nodes in massive. too many nodes :help:


I've experience with Massive, it's hard to learn and master. Good to know you have alternatives.

[geo_n]

I tried lw particles, no matter what I do they just don't get good results when the flow is more than 1 direction especially flowing against each other. They vibrate and intersect each other even with setting the sim resolution low and making particles size huge output size. If any lw developer ever developed a simple crowd walk sim(doable with nodes maybe) with good enough colliision they would make real money considering after my experience with massive I"m not so sure its artist friendly. Lol. Now I"m trying to figure out how to export massive sims to maya particle to lw for hd isntance rendering. I dont want to delve deeper into 3delight either.
On another note I just found out that importing fbx in 9.6 layout has different scale importing fbx in modeller. The camera is instact but the animation is not. Maya imports fbx from max with no probs and vice versa. Hope Core can play nice.

[Rayek]

Could this be a solution?

http://www.harkyman.com/blender-people/

Looks interesting, but I have not tried it yet. Create crowd simulation in Blender, import into Lightwave. The scripts haven't been updated for some time, though, and you will have to use a special build of Blender 2.42a. Someone should really pick this up again.

[Titus]

Could this be a solution?

http://www.harkyman.com/blender-people/

Looks interesting, but I have not tried it yet. Create crowd simulation in Blender, import into Lightwave. The scripts haven't been updated for some time, though, and you will have to use a special build of Blender 2.42a. Someone should really pick this up again.

Blender people isn't an option, just look at their examples. They have several problems with the implementation at this moment, maybe in the future.

[Rayek]

Perhaps wait a bit longer? The technical targets of Blender 2.5 within the Durian project scope are:

# High detail multi-res modeling (sculpting) and render (micropolygons?)
# Fire/smoke/volumetrics & explosions
# Compositing using tiles/regions, so it becomes resolution independent (!)
# Crowd/massive simulation (fix animation system to allow duplicates)
# Improve library system for managing complex projects
# Deliver in 4k digital cinema (depending agreement with sponsor)

Be patient, my heart... :-)

[Cageman]

I tried lw particles, no matter what I do they just don't get good results when the flow is more than 1 direction especially flowing against each other. They vibrate and intersect each other even with setting the sim resolution low and making particles size huge output size. If any lw developer ever developed a simple crowd walk sim(doable with nodes maybe) with good enough colliision they would make real money considering after my experience with massive I"m not so sure its artist friendly. Lol. Now I"m trying to figure out how to export massive sims to maya particle to lw for hd isntance rendering. I dont want to delve deeper into 3delight either.
On another note I just found out that importing fbx in 9.6 layout has different scale importing fbx in modeller. The camera is instact but the animation is not. Maya imports fbx from max with no probs and vice versa. Hope Core can play nice.

Hmm...

Now that you have it setup in Maya, my suggestion is that you convert all particles to locators, get hold of PointOven and transfer all those locators back to LW so that you can make use of HD-instance.

EDIT: Of course, try with FBX first... if that doesn't work, PointOven will.

Regarding scale and FBX... We usually use a scale in Maya where 1 unit = 1cm, which means that a 1x1x1 unit cube in Maya = 1x1x1 m cube in LW. This may sound wierd, but we have noticed that there are alot of rendererrors and whatnot with MR when we went too far away from the origin, so we always do everything in 1/100 scale. Also, Mayas dynamics is designed to work in this scale, so it makes sense in several ways. So, when importing stuff through FBX into LW from Maya, I always set the scale to 100. Make sure you know the exact scale in Maya, since it is vital to know upon import into Layout.

[Mr Rid]

Checked it out with the red cliff mov, tnx. I'm doing some tests with hd instance right now and present tom to PD.

A brief shot, but an example of getting instances to move over uneven terrain. I could not begin to get particles to work for something like this (better for flying/swimming swarms), and had more control with displaced meshes.
http://www.box.net/shared/static/ngyvfqsm5r.mov

[Cageman]

A brief shot, but an example of getting instances to move over uneven terrain. I could not begin to get particles to work for something like this (better for flying/swimming swarms), and had more control with displaced meshes.
http://www.box.net/shared/static/ngyvfqsm5r.mov

http://www.newtek.com/forums/showpost.php?p=885507&postcount=6

[erikals]

there were some interesting techniques here as well...
http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=86338&page=8

[geo_n]

Thanks guys. Im going another direction as my TD instructed. There's just no interaction doing it in hd instance.
HD instance will only be used on the very far objects. The near objects will be done with massive or max depending on what's the better solution. Around 150 people on each side of the street all simulated by crowd sim. The far objects are on mesh planes with hd instance that I saw from red cliff video, really cool Mr.Rid.
Particles won't work for intersecting crowds unless its fish or birds.

This will all be rendered in vray except for the far objects done in hd instance.
http://revver.com/video/1734521/test-render/

Cageman- that's why I pm'd about maya particles to max/lw so I can get them from massive>maya>max/lw so I can get simulations faster from massive. Unfortuntalely there are too many issues with the programs :twak:.