2009

A few behaviors cannot be weighted. These are Avoid, Surface Follow, and
Orientation. Avoid and Surface Follow take over after all of the other behaviors
have been applied to a delegate. They can take stringent measures to affect
the delegate, possibly overpowering other behaviors in order to meet their
constraints. Orientation simply sets the delegate's facing direction. It cannot
be weighted and does not apply a force.
Behavior Tips
A few helpful things to know about behaviors in character studio:
■ You can create conditional behavioral systems with Crowd's Cognitive
Controller feature. This uses the MAXScript scripting language to determine
when to effect a transition from one behavior to another; we've provided
a number of sample scripts for you to learn from and adopt to your own
simulations in
Cognitive Controller Editor on page 4857 and State Transition
Dialog
on page 4861.
■ The Behavior rollout appears immediately after the Crowd object > Setup
rollout in the Modify panel. However, it doesn't show up until you've
added at least one behavior to the crowd object.
■ The Crowd panel displays only one Behavior rollout at a time. To access
a different one, choose its name from the drop-down list at the bottom of
the Crowd object's Setup rollout.
■ As with most scene entities in 3ds Max, it's a good idea to give behaviors
custom names, such as "Seek Doorway" or "Follow Hilly Surface." You do
this by clicking the behavior's name in the Setup rollout and entering a
new one from the keyboard.
■ The default behavior settings may not always give the ideal results. The
optimal settings depend vary with the particulars of your simulation setup;
in many cases, if not most, you'll need to experiment with the settings to
get the results you want. In some cases, you might need to animate settings
as well.
One particularly useful feature of the delegate is its ability to display, using
colored vectors, the strength and direction of the various forces acting
upon it during solution of the crowd simulation. Each force can have a
unique, identifying color. For example, the Seek behavior uses green by
default, while the Wander behavior uses aqua. You can change these colors
to any you like.
If a simulation isn't proceeding as expected, you can debug it by observing
the vectors during the solution. And if the solution occurs too quickly,
Assigning Behaviors | 4775