2009

Use Priorities When on, biped/delegates are computed one delegate at a time,
in order of their Priority values, from lowest to highest. Also, backtracking
becomes available, and Step Solve becomes unavailable. Default=off.
Backtracking Turns on backtracking functionality when solving a crowd
simulation that uses bipeds. Default=off.
When Backtracking is on during the solution, in the case of an impending
collision between bipeds, the Crowd system will back up the simulation to
the beginning of the current clip, and then try a different traversal of the
lower-priority delegate/biped's motion flow graph. If necessary, the system
will back up two or more clips.
Priority Rollout
Create panel > Helpers > Object Type rollout > Crowd > Priority rollout
Select a Crowd object. > Modify panel > Priority rollout
The Crowd system uses the Priority rollout settings when solving a simulation
involving bipeds associated with delegates. The Priority parameter is a positive
integer assigned by the user to a delegate. When priorities are used, the Crowd
simulation computes one biped at a time, based on its priority setting from
lowest to highest; that is, a lower Priority setting means a higher priority. If the
priorities of two biped/delegates are the same, the computation order of those
two biped/delegates is randomly determined.
This topic describes the six different ways of setting a delegate's priority, and
how priorities might be put to use in different situations.
Using Priorities
If you have a large crowd all going in one direction, you would typically want
the delegates in front to solve first. In that case, using Proximity To An Object
or Proximity To A Grid would be useful in setting priorities.
In a case where you start with a circle of bipeds, and you want them all to
wander and mingle, you might not care about the bipeds' priorities. You could
let them all have the same priority and let the system decide which goes first.
However, it might be better to assign random priorities or make priorities
unique, so that you are guaranteed the same order each time, and you can
read the priority numbers to know what will happen next. This also lets you
change the order if you need to.
Crowd Animation User Interface | 4907