8

Creating Crowd Helpers 1009
of these helpers. The crowd helper serves as the
command center for setting up and solving crow d
simulations, while delegates provide stand-ins for
animated objects. The crowd helper controls are
used to animate the delegates, then later you link
objects to delegates to create the finished scene.
Cr owd Helper
A crowd helper object appears in viewports as
blue tetrahedron. The location and size of the
crowd helper does not affect the simulation. For
theeasiestworkflow,createthecrowdhelperwith
a relatively large size, and place it where you can
easily select it. You’l l rarely need more than one
Crowd helper object per scene.
After you create delegates, y ou use the crowd
helper to clone delegates and d ist ribute the clones,
add behaviors, apply behaviors to delegates, link
delegates to animated objects, and much more.
Delegate Helper s
The Crowd system in character studio uses
Delegatehelperobjectsasintermediariesbetween
the crowd simulation and the influenced objects.
A delegate is a non-rendering pyramid-shaped
object. Its apex points in the direct ion the crowd
system uses as “forward” when it m oves the
delegate around.
Use one delegate per object to be animated by
the crowd system. You can add delegates one by
one, or use any of the standard 3ds Max methods
for cloning objects, including SHIFT+clone
and the Array function. Ho wever, the Crowd
object offers a convenient
Scatter Objects (page
2–1040)
function that lets you clone delegates and
distribute the clones over a surface or within a
volume, with options for orientation and scaling.
Procedures
To crea te a Crowd hel per object:
1.
OntheCreatepanel,clickHelpers.
2. Click Crowd, and drag the helper object to a
convenient size.
Tip: Makethecrowdhelperobjectlargeenough
so you can ea
sily select it in two or more
viewports. The size of the helper does not affect
the crowd simulation in any way.