Crowd animation lets you simulate the behavior of crowds of people, animals, or other beings parametrically, using several different types of objects. The topics that follow describe the user interface for setting up a crowd simulation.
Crowd of mannequins in a subway station animated using character studio
This topic summarizes the keyboard shortcuts available for crowd animation.
The Delegate is a special helper object used in crowd animation. It serves as an agent for motion created by a Crowd object and its behaviors. The Crowd object controls a delegate or delegates, whose motion can then be imparted to a biped or other object. Delegates cannot be rendered.
The Crowd helper object acts as the command center for controlling crowd simulations in character studio. In most cases, you won't need more than one Crowd object per scene.
A vector field is a special type of space warp that crowd members use to move around irregular objects such as curved, concave surfaces. The Vector Field gizmo, a box-shaped lattice, is placed and sized so that it surrounds the object to be avoided. The vectors are generated from the lattice intersections. These vectors are, by default, perpendicular to the surface of the object to which the field is applied; if necessary, you can smooth them out with a blending function. The crowd members move around the object by traveling perpendicular to the vectors.
The Crowd system can use two different types of motion synthesis, which lets character studio adjust the simulation results dynamically to account for differing conditions. This section deals with the application of motion synthesis to non-bipedal crowds, such as a flock of birds.
