2009

■ Give each character a unique name that will allow you to identify it in the
simulation to some degree. Example: BigMan02, LittleGirl03. See
Naming
the Biped
on page 4155.
■ For each character, disable the MeshSmooth modifier or other modifiers
above Physique that add polygons.
■ Hide the character meshes and leave the bipeds visible.
This setup makes it easy to merge the characters into the crowd scene. When
characters are merged, the meshes themselves will be hidden, which will
improve system performance.
Preparing Motions for a Biped Crowd
The clips you use for a biped crowd simulation can be loaded from the CD
that comes with character studio, imported from motion capture files, or
created from scratch.
The integrity of transitions between clips in the motion flow network is very
important when creating a biped crowd simulation. When creating transitions
for a single biped, it's a simple matter to correct individual transitions after
the motion flow script has been created. With a crowd, having to correct
transitions for each biped after the simulation is complete would be extremely
time-consuming. It is much more efficient to ensure your transitions are correct
before starting to solve the simulation.
One way to make this process easier is to set up all motions so each has an
ideal transition of exactly the same number of frames, such as 10 or 15. Then
you can optimize transitions for this length, and all or most transitions will
work flawlessly.
To check transitions, create a simple script for one biped using several
transitions in the graph. Check the motion and work with transitions
individually until they look right. You might not catch all bad transitions
with this method, but you'll catch most of them. A “bad” transition would
be one where the feet skip or hop when they should be walking, or any other
undesirable change that occurs during a transition. See
Customizing Transitions
on page 4525.
After solving the biped crowd simulation the first few times, check again for
bad transitions you might have missed the first time around. After a few
simulations, most likely you will have found all or nearly all the bad
transitions.
4798 | Chapter 17 character studio