Basic crowd sim possibility

Started by Kadri, August 06, 2015, 09:08:02 PM

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Hannes

Yes, that's true, and we seem to be the only busy animators at the time, aren't we? This thread seems to be some sort of a private conversation between the two of us  ;D ;D ;D
Come on, let's rant a bit about the others to see if there are any clandestine spectators!  ;) ;) ;)

Kadri

#91

I was really thinking about to post an image with an arrow sign
that had "look at the animation forum too guys" on it into the image sharing section :D

Yeah it is mostly you and me here  :D
But Ulco felt like he was really eager to try too.He might make a late comeback maybe :D


Oshyan

I was just talking to Martin (Huisman) recently about how I feel like there's so much untapped animation potential, and you guys are showing much of that here. These things have been possible for years but are only now just being figured out by you smart fellows. I think animation is often thought of as just too time consuming, but I would guess that your tests - at least - have not been tremendously long to render. Making a full, final quality scene out of them would certainly take a lot longer, but one look at what DocCharley65 has been doing and you can see that there is tremendous potential for even a single person with limited resources to do some great animation, even with a restricted amount of time and budget.

- Oshyan

Hannes

True indeed! Making some tests in lower resolution usually doesn't take that much time, and it's great fun to see your idea coming to life.

Kadri

#94

DocCharley65 will probably show an army of spaceships or similar in no time.
He is absolutely good as there are others too of course...just joking in the previous post obviously :)

My tests took between 1-3 hours with 100 frames mostly.
Final 720P renders would be feasible for most i think.

And yeah it is really fun to do these tests as Hannes said.

Kadri

#95

Hannes or to anyone who reads here :)
I think you can do a really great looking Massive (pun intended) scene even with the features that are just now present.
If you think about the price of such a software (for example: http://www.massivesoftware.com/products.html )
i will do the manual parts that you need to do such a scene with joy even :)
I wanted to do such a scene but i just have no time and don't want to go into character modeling-animating (i haven't even done it in a serious way until today) just now.
It should be very easy for a rigger animator that have especially the objects ready.

* Use say 10 characters (men, women,warrior etc.) or so much you want.
* Make an animated sequence of every object.
   Say you want an army of sword fighting warriors.
* Make a population with one of them.
* Then use the exact same population with another character but in the object node rotate the warrior 180 degree  and change its
   position just a little further then the other population (only translate in the object node of the object itself).
   I haven't tried it but now hopefully all the warriors should look as they are fighting each other.
* The other steps are repeating the same with other characters and using masks for the other populations etc. how you like it.
* If you trow running guys,horses,different colors or whatever you want etc. in it should look quite interesting.

I will watch such a scene with joy whoever makes it with Terragen :)

Kadri

#96

I made just a quick test image to see if it will work in principle:
These are free objects (the warriors sword is floating).
There are two object populations.
The best part is you can change anytime some parts with another population with masks-density shaders.
Even individual parts of an object(different hats,swords etc.) depending how far you want to go.


[attachimg=1]

Kadri

#97

Ulco think about your medieval towns with moving peoples,animals all around.
(i hope you got an itch enough to do it :D )

TheBadger

#98
I'll say that one of the things that surprised me was how the wheels bounce. Or rather how they don't stick to the ground at every step.
In hannes' last clip, for example, you can see pretty clearly how the wheels jump over little low areas in the terrain, then landing again on the next raised area. It almost seems like TG has gravity built in. Of course I know it does not.
But it could, couldn't it? At some time in the future. It should. Hmmm, maybe I just mean physics in general.

One of you should do a tut on this. The info on using object sequences is scattered. And then all of this here that you have added to the conversation is well worth compiling and archiving in a tut. There should be much more interest in this thread than is evident. As you have said. But may just be timing. Anyway, I agree with you, this is a bad ass thread!  ;D

I am watching to see how far you guys push this. Curious too where the ceiling is, and what planetside will do to make things better.

Hannes, I was looking for some movement cycles do to my interest in this thread. I found some things that are for Max. Perhaps you can use them
http://animium.com/2014/11/run-cycle-motion-capture
http://animium.com/2014/11/drunkards-walk-motion-capture (zombie?)

Some cool stuff here:
http://jonathansymmonds.com/tutorials-help/downloads Not sure if the cycles include the models or not.


I imagine with a little DOF, you guys could do some shorts with just the stuff you have already covered here! I think you already said that too though.
It has been eaten.

TheBadger

#99
I am also very curious to hear a definitive statement ( ;D ) on what is really permissible in an object sequence, such as it is, obj. Just how much can you cram into a 5 second animation sequence? For example, a building collapsing including particles and debris. Or, something simpler, like two people fist fighting with their clothes/hair moving accordingly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exQ9OjebY-Q OK, not so simple  ;D but still, in theory, bow much is really *possible*

Also, I did not catch any griping about ALEMBIC 1.5 compression, or whatever it is. I thought we were all determined to get that?

QuoteALEMBIC is an open source exchange format that is becoming the industry standard for exchanging animated computer graphics between content creation software packages.
It has been eaten.

Kadri


If you design your characters at the modeling rigging-animating stage accordingly doing fist-sword fight kinda things are very easy to do as a crowd population.
The problem is you have to be an animator. And when you want to look it real with different sizes etc. there will be a limit how close you can get.
But then crowd scenes are for a distance and that will help. You could use some hero object for the foreground.
You could do what game makers do and design different animation stages that go from one another seamlessly and manually put them together.

It will be a very manual process but it is doable to an certain level. The prices for such programs are high for a reason.

But just as a feeling i can say what you can do in Terragen with careful planning is a thousand times higher and more what i expected you can do .

Hannes

Kadri, of course this is possible. See the attached video. I did this in Vue a long time ago. It's quite similar to TG's populations, except that you can use animated objects (without having to use object sequences). What you can see is, that some fighters do exactly the same at exactly the same time, because there is no offset function as well. And some fighters fight against nothing... :)

What bothers me in TG for something like this, is the fact, that you need a tremendous amount of object sequences. As long as we don't have the features I described in my thread ( http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,20363.0.html ) using object sequences for such vast scenes is really a bit tedious.
But I have some ideas for walking people in TG without using object sequences I haven't tested yet.

Michael, yes, the bouncing was not intended, but somehow it looks quite nice.
Thanks for the links! I have a lot of motion capture files on my HD, but you can never have enough.

We'll see, how far we can push this. I guess there's still a lot to discover, and with the help of the Planetside crew  ;) we'll surely push the limits a bit farther.

Kadri

#102

There should be much more options that would be really great....wait how many times did we said that Hannes?  ;D

Even with those problems a fast short scene like your example above looks always very nice :)

Kadri

Quote from: Hannes on August 17, 2015, 03:53:08 AM
...
But I have some ideas for walking people in TG without using object sequences I haven't tested yet.
...

If you think about using separate body parts and moving them there is too much manual input involved.I tried it.
But maybe you have another thing in your mind?

Kadri

Quote from: Hannes on August 17, 2015, 03:53:08 AM
...I did this in Vue a long time ago.
It's quite similar to TG's populations, except that you can use animated objects (without having to use object sequences)...

Hannes is there a rigging,bones or whatever feature in Vue by the way?