Crowd Simulation: Part 1

Eventually I have got the time to get on with my crowd simulation project. I have 7 days to go on the project, so, I won't be able to add in animation. At the moment I am trying to achieve some believable behavioral animation. I am trying to simulate a medieval fight scene.

Here is the output so far. In this screenshot you can see there are two kinds of agents. The front rows are foot soldiers and the back portion consists of horses, which will hopefully have riders on them soon.

Formation with different agent types

First of all I started by defining a basic human agent.

Basic human agent with primitive geometry

 I would have gone on with just using cubes, but the app I am using requires a bone structure

Basic human agent with rig attached to it

Instantiating the agent to start building a crowd:

Creating instances of agents

Here I have gone on and added some variation to the population field. The agents are more dis-organised and have a randomised orientation

Adding variation to the population field

Now I go ahead and add variation to the model itself. This is being done at two different levels:
First, I add variation to the overall agent scale. As you can notice in the screen-shot below, the overall size of the agents populating the scene has some variation.

Agents with added variation in the overall scaling

At the next level of variation, variation has been added to the individual body parts. The head and the stomach pieces show variation in the next screen-shot

Variation added on a per-bodypart basis

Next I tried out having different types of agents populating the same population field. In the screenshot below, the scene has, a human, a car and a horse crowdEntityType

Population field populated with different types of agents

Next I started working with formations. The screenshot below illustrates a rectangular formation of horses. Some randomness and variation has been added into the orientation and columns and rows of the field to break the even-ness

A formation of horses

The example below illustrates placement along a curve.

A formation driven by curves

As the last thing tonight I made a formation of horses facing inwards. The rider may be preparing for an attack in this situation.

Sony Games Modelling - 5

Putting everything together now. One more pass at set dressing and then I get into texturing this. Not really looking forward to it.

Work in progress

Sony Games Modelling - 4.1

Work in progress update. Added some Houdini rubble to my scene.

WIP with rough rubble

Sony Games Modelling - 4

For the past couple of days, I have been concentrating on the drill design and also have been looking at the composition an bit. I also went in and did some clean-up, deleting unwanted nodes and naming everything.

Here is a work in progress image:

WIP - Drill Detail

Sony Games Modelling - 3

Now I have been modelling for about 5-6 days and I have the basic geometry ready. This it the blocking I have with the rough geometry.

Work in progress:

Work in progress: Clean geometry

Now I am going in and cleaning up the geometry, organising my assets a bit and then I get on with destruction and texturing.

Sony Games Modelling - 2

It's day 2 working on the project. Have just slept for 4 hours in the last 40 hours, so was a slow night. This is where I got to till now. I have nearly 6000 polygons on it and this is rendered using renderMan in 32 seconds for the frame. The geometry hasn't really been optimised yet, so hopefully it will be much more economical when finished.

Day 2 progress

I am beginning to get a bit worried now as I just have 10 days left to finish this off. Will need to increase my speed.

Sony Games Modelling - 1

After weeks of delays I have actually got on to modelling for the Sony games project. I am starting with modelling props and I have done the couch and the centre table. I am very slow with the process but hopefully I will pick up some speed as I go along. I am really enjoying the modelling and I am surprised as I always found modelling a tedious process. Will post the couch images with more detail of the mesh later. Been working for 18 hours straight and can't be bothered to take screen-shots and crop them on gimp.

This is the render of the basic cleaned up geometry of the props. I still have to texture it and add wear and tear and character to it. This scene has some 3500 polys. This is a rough renderMan render with render time of 19 seconds.

A rough render of the couch and the table. Rendered with renderMan,

Wire-frame for the scene