dynamic suggestions and more

[andrew]

Hi Yeah.

I thought i would give you guys some new feedbag and a few suggestions. please remind me if i already have suggested some of this stuff.

1: (need more improvements regarding dynamics.)

you might know i have been trying from time to time making agents with some secondary tail movements. When blend actions didn't do the trick i tried to rely on partial dynamics.
the thought is good and in theory it works. But if i create an agent which move in z direction and rotate a bit in the x axis, i get a stiff tail. i can confirm that the dynamics does work with gravity.
the tail bends downward as it should, but it won't bend in the x axis. what i am looking for is the curved drag from the tail you get when moving around.

2: (more options for the RBD emitter)

I find that the RBD emitter is very good and robust, but lacks in features. One feature i miss a lot is an delete by age attribute.
If you have maybe several hundreds of agents emitting several RBD bodies the system will quickly get very heavy, and that is very undesirable.
Also other kill attributes would be nice. like, bounding boxes, specific collision detection or range distance from emitter.

Another feature i thought about could be an event procedure. An example, when RBD body collides with terrain, change into a zone or field.
this zone/field will then have a pre-animated animation like, quickly crank up the magnitude and then drop to zero again. I think you can visualize how this could be used as a bomb trigger or landmines for the agents

3: (improvements to instancing )

I find it very slow when instancing out my cache for the RBD emitter. i have had crashes several times, so i think you guys should try and see if it can be improved. although when it works, it works like a charm

4: (dynamic surface detection)

A thing i find frustrating is if i have several agents and they enable dynamics and fall, then the remaining agents will eventually walk into the dynamic agents and send them flying out everywhere, regardless how heavy they are.

an idea i got was to having some sort of dynamic terrain solver that would turn the dynamic agents into a terrain, or simply contribute to the original terrain. the agents can then simply walk all over the dynamic agents, and make the crowd sim more realistic.
also some sort of IK points could be triggered when walking on top of another agent.

i can't remember if it already excist but, being able to turn dynamics on and off while simulating would also make things much faster.


5: (additional renderer)

Last i would like to suggest render support for Octane render. To me it is more and more my primary renderer.
at the moment it can only render with the meshdrive 3 which is cool But because of memory limit on the GPU, makes it difficult for me to render more than 30 or 50 agents.
Octane render CAN render over thousands of instances but it seems like Miarmy is not using instancing technology or am i wrong?

In Octane render for maya you have to enable a flag on the object which will be the instanced object. I have tested it on an agent but it does not seem to work that way.

besides of these few suggestiones i think the crowd system is coming along very nice and i hope to make an investment in this great tool in the near future for sure.


Will look forward to the next installment

regards
Andrew

[Yeah YANG]

Thank you Andrew for your concerning:) really appreciate your suggestions:)

Let me answer your question!!

1.
firstly the new 2.2.7 fixed some bugs on physx and the partial dynamic will be more accurate!

Have you tried to turn the gravity off ?? In physical global.
then if you don't want it to bend in x axis, you can just limit it~
there is "hinge" type of physical joint you can use,

Recently, we found the PhysX have "Drive" features, which maybe similar like your mentioned curved drag. will try it out later:)


2.
The RBD emitter is our major develop plan feature in future~

the dead attr is easy to add but it's a little bit difficult for renderer, especially you know our system is instancing based. OK

I thought the thing also before, I'll firstly make a bomb and see is that good:)
That event is not difficult to define~

Yes your suggestion about collision and bounding box stuff is the "gun fight system" we're developing:) Will available in July~

Also you can see our missile system, it can reduce the number of whole RBD objects. pariticle + RBD missile can lead very complex but easy to rendered scene.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE5i8L3G2rI&list=PLDB7B39D835ECB57D

3.
There is tempraroily no better idea, maybe in future we can convert it to particle cache~

we suggest use the particle build fake arrows, and use real RBD missile to build the physical arrow, then the huge scene with very simple setup~~

And also some time is based on the shots, we dont need use RBD emitter build the whole simulation we can put some fake particles on the ground before the real simulation.

4.
integrate into the terrain is difficult but maybe create some new object around the body make them can be detected by the agent will be easier. I'm sorry it cannot be done in a short time but we'll try this in future:)

5.
Thank you for introducing the renderer, we'll check them out.
mesh drive is actually maya objects (drive by procedural), in the new version you can also display them out. for example if your agent is as simple as a sphere in maya, that is means Octane render cannot render 50 spheres, Is that your maya character is too density?

instancing is some agents with the same shape, that will loose the detail in many cases.

thank you for your suggestions!! we'll try them out one by one especially the physX stuffs:)

Best,
--Yeah

Jun 18, 2013 15:05:24 GMT -5 andrew said:

Hi Yeah.

I thought i would give you guys some new feedbag and a few suggestions. please remind me if i already have suggested some of this stuff.

1: (need more improvements regarding dynamics.)

you might know i have been trying from time to time making agents with some secondary tail movements. When blend actions didn't do the trick i tried to rely on partial dynamics.
the thought is good and in theory it works. But if i create an agent which move in z direction and rotate a bit in the x axis, i get a stiff tail. i can confirm that the dynamics does work with gravity.
the tail bends downward as it should, but it won't bend in the x axis. what i am looking for is the curved drag from the tail you get when moving around.

2: (more options for the RBD emitter)

I find that the RBD emitter is very good and robust, but lacks in features. One feature i miss a lot is an delete by age attribute.
If you have maybe several hundreds of agents emitting several RBD bodies the system will quickly get very heavy, and that is very undesirable.
Also other kill attributes would be nice. like, bounding boxes, specific collision detection or range distance from emitter.

Another feature i thought about could be an event procedure. An example, when RBD body collides with terrain, change into a zone or field.
this zone/field will then have a pre-animated animation like, quickly crank up the magnitude and then drop to zero again. I think you can visualize how this could be used as a bomb trigger or landmines for the agents

3: (improvements to instancing )

I find it very slow when instancing out my cache for the RBD emitter. i have had crashes several times, so i think you guys should try and see if it can be improved. although when it works, it works like a charm

4: (dynamic surface detection)

A thing i find frustrating is if i have several agents and they enable dynamics and fall, then the remaining agents will eventually walk into the dynamic agents and send them flying out everywhere, regardless how heavy they are.

an idea i got was to having some sort of dynamic terrain solver that would turn the dynamic agents into a terrain, or simply contribute to the original terrain. the agents can then simply walk all over the dynamic agents, and make the crowd sim more realistic.
also some sort of IK points could be triggered when walking on top of another agent.

i can't remember if it already excist but, being able to turn dynamics on and off while simulating would also make things much faster.


5: (additional renderer)

Last i would like to suggest render support for Octane render. To me it is more and more my primary renderer.
at the moment it can only render with the meshdrive 3 which is cool But because of memory limit on the GPU, makes it difficult for me to render more than 30 or 50 agents.
Octane render CAN render over thousands of instances but it seems like Miarmy is not using instancing technology or am i wrong?

In Octane render for maya you have to enable a flag on the object which will be the instanced object. I have tested it on an agent but it does not seem to work that way.

besides of these few suggestiones i think the crowd system is coming along very nice and i hope to make an investment in this great tool in the near future for sure.


Will look forward to the next installment

regards
Andrew

[andrew]

Hi Yeah

thank you for looking into my suggestions.

i did try turning off gravity and that gave me no results, still having a stiff tail.

and i did adjust the hinge limits but that didn't do the trick.
i will wait and see what you guys will come up with in later versions.

the missile system you guys are working on looks great will look forward to test it out soon.

sounds great with new features for the RBD emitter, will look forward to see how the event procedure will come along

nice to hear that you guys are thinking about my suggestion about turning agents into terrain. No rush in getting it done sooner, it is just a suggestion for future versions

about the renderer, i am glad you guys are considering implementing renderer capabilities for Octane render.

Yes the problem with the renderer is that it can only render up to 4 mio polygons, because it lacks in memory. It is a physical GPU renderer, thus have only the amount of memory that is on the GPU card.
The renderer can use instances to render very large and dense scenes.

My current polygon count for agents are like between 10 k and 20 k

i hope you guys can figure it out

And as always, i love your tool

regards
Andrew