Creating CROWDS ALONG PATHS with Iclone!

what's up guys Justin here with the character Essentials so in today's video we're going to continue our series on crowds and iclone by talking about how we can animate a crowd along a path let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so remember that this is the part of the crowd simulation functions that were added in iclone 8.4 so make sure that you've updated to version 8.4 in order to access these features if you do want to check out iclone 8.4 I will link to it in the notes down below note that is an affiliate link if you do purchase through that link then I do receive a commission but um you can get a free trial as well if you want to give some of this a try but let's jump over into iclone and take a look at this so what we want to do in this situation is we want to use the crowd functions in order to generate a crowd that walks along a path and so in this situation we want to start by going up to the create option we want to draw our path so to do that we're just going to go to create and click on path and then we're just going to [Music] click in this scene so I'm going to click right here we'll click right here we'll click right here then when you're done you can just hit the um you can actually rightclick in order to place that and so what we've done is we've just generated a simple path now the first thing you want to do with your path is you want to go over into your modify settings so you want to select your path and probably the best way to do that is to click on one of these little uh these little arrows right here in order to get that to select but we're going to click on the option for MD um which is going to be your motion director walkway settings and what we want to do is we want to adjust this walkway like this and so note that you can do this in order to set the width of that walkway you can also edit different points in here just by clicking on them like this so we could kind of like scale this out if we wanted to and so you can move these points around if you want to do do that um just depending on what you're trying to do and so in this case right we're going to click on this point we'll move this one over here and I'm just trying to smooth out this path a little bit so I'm not getting that kind of like overlapping but we've set our path width in here we can click off of this to be done with that and now we're ready to go and so let's talk about how to add a single character along the path first so let's jump into our actor settings right here and I'm going to find a character to bring in and we'll just use a character that everyone can kind of follow along with we'll um we'll add the Camila character where she's in the dress and so I'm just going to drag that character into the scene right here like this and so when we do that that's going to bring Camila into the scene and so what we want to do is we want to animate this character walking along this path and so to do this we're going to use motion director and so the best way to get started with motion director is to go to window workspace and you want to go into the motion director workspace and what that's going to do is that's going to give you access to your motion director controls over here and so with our motion director controls what we want to do is we're going to have Camila selected and what we want to do is we want to set this so that she is we're going to go with Auto on path and so when we do that what we need to do is we need to pick the path that she's going to go on and so in this case all we do is just click on pick path and then just click on the path now notice you're going to get a load IMD failed that's because there's no actual animation data associated with this character and so we need to go back and we need to add that to our Camilla model and so I'm going to go in here and and so in this case remember that these are basically intelligent motion files and so you can find them by going over into your motion director now I don't remember how many of these come by default and iclone there are two packs of these as well right now so there's The Pedestrian actions and the athletic run which you can get that are going to add additional walking Styles and Idol Styles so I think you should have some built in though um but I'm not 100% sure and so what we're going to do though is we're just going to pick a casual movement for our motion director and so in order to do that we're just going to take this casual Alt we're just going to drag it on our Camila character well now if we go back into motion director like this and pick our path this is going to work and it's going to align her or it's going to set her up with that path right here and so now if we were to click on the button for start like this what's going to happen is she's going to do the Casual walk along the path um and so you can see how she's kind of automatically doing this right here and what we would want to do if we wanted to store this movement is we would just want to set this to record when we're doing this and there's a little random skip in there for some reason um but you can see how she's basically animated walking along this path just like this so I'm going to go ahead and click on stop right here so you can use this and then if if you want her to walk along the path you can click on the record button and what that's going to do is that's going to record those key frames over time so it's going to record this in here as she walks and it's just kind of adding those to your animation so we'll let this go just a little bit further maybe to right here and then we're going to click on the option for stop right there well now those key frames have been stored to her character in your animation like this so you can use this to add a singular character walking along a path inside of iclone just like that now say that that we didn't want to add Camila to this scene say that we wanted to add kind of a crowd and so there's a different way that we're going to go about that so to do that we're going to go up to create we're going to click on the option for scatter generate crowd that's going to pop up the window for generating a crowd right here and so in this case what we want is we want the spawn region to be pick object so we're going to click on pick object we're going to Mouse over this and we're going to click on this path right here and notice how we've got these Sliders in here that allow us to set the number of actors or characters that are going to be placed in here like this you can also adjust things like the spacing of those characters and the direction right so you can set them where some of them are going in One Direction some of them are going the other you can set them with they're all going in reverse or all going forward like this notice how you can click on the option for Generate placement in order to re-randomize that or re spawn this in here now what we want to do is we want to add some actors one thing I do recommend by the way is I do recommend saving before you do any of this where it's adding a bunch of actors in here I have found that I've gotten some crashes in here when I'm doing this um probably due to the amount of data that it's processing when it runs through this so you might want to go ahead and save your project before you start adding these characters but now what I want to do is I want to set up my actor pool so this can randomly generate those characters so to do that that you can either click on the button right here to add actors directly from a folder you can also click on a tag and you can do a search or you can just go into your content browser and just drag characters in and so I have a number of characters from the social group bundle which is basically these uh modern people these are kind of set to be kind of like background models they're a little bit lower poly than the Character Creator files as far as I know you can include character creator um characters as well um but this just has kind of a collection of different people in it that are kind of optimized for this kind of thing um you can see how it says crowd set which I think means that these are set up for basically kind of like the lower Po in here but you can use your own characters as well so some of those bundles have been provided to me by iclone so that I can try them out and use them for uh both demonstrations and tutorials on this channel as well um but I just have a number of these in here and I'm just going to drag a few you in and just for fun we're going to drag in maybe the business person right here um let's see maybe a casual person right here this older character just all sorts of different characters like this but then I'm also going to drag in my Camila and my Kevin so those are character creator files as well I do want to make sure these are tagged by the way so in this case Camila I want to tag tag as female adult um Kevin I want to tag as male adult right here and there is this option here for deploy with variant materials so if you're generating a bunch of different actors but you're not using more actors than you have spots in here you can click on deploy with variant materials and those crowd characters will kind of randomize the clothes that they're wearing or at least the colors the clothes they're wearing so that you don't have just like duplicated characters over and over again so right now if I was to click on the option for deploy actors what that's going to do is that's going to generate a crowd of people and place them in the scene we're going to place these characters in here like this and notice what that did for the most part and um my character creator files by the way are not set up with those variant materials which is why they look exactly the same but you can see how this basically came in here and this um this placed your characters in here on these different points and so you can adjust this meaning if you wanted more characters in here you could just reclick the button for deploy actors again though this is probably a situation where clicking on the option for Save before you do this would probably be a good idea but um I think we're going to be okay for right now and so what that's going to do is that's going to generate this crowd but we have a problem with the crowd and I'm actually going to remove Kevin from the list um so that I only have one character in here that um doesn't have the random colors in there so we don't have repetition just over and over and over again okay so I'm good with this and so what we've done is we've generated this group of characters in here but the problem is if we were to jump over into motion director mode and we can't run this yet because we haven't finalized our characters but the problem right now is there's no animations associated with these characters right but what we can do is over here notice how there's options to include either motions or IM am imds so in this case I want to use the IMD files and so I want to bring in a couple of those IMD files from that uh pack that I have you should have some of these built in without buying the pack you could at least do the Casual I think um for a couple of these characters but I'm going to bring in a few of these so like for example I've got a casual walk female specific a casual walk male specific and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to bring a few of these in here so maybe crowd Sim scroll or stroll right here now notice that when you do this these have tags associated with them and what those tags are is they're going to allow you to match them with the tags that are um applied to your characters up here so for example this casual walk female I only want applied to female characters the Casual walk male I only want applied to male characters and if we had like kids or elderly in here I guess we do have an elderly um but if we had those in here we could also include those tags right here cuz it's going to do tag matching in order to apply this now this is where I would probably hit the save button before you do the deploy um because what it does is it basically generates all of these actors and then it applies IMD files or movement files to them um so what we're going to do is we're going to save this and we're going to click on the option for deploy actors right here and so when we do that what that's going to do is that's going to go through and it's going to apply all of this information to these characters and so when it does that what it's going to do is it's going to set them all up for movement um so you can see how this is setting all of those different assets things like that but now if I was to jump over into motion director like this I'm going to go ahead and close out of my crowd generation function and so that kind of finalizes all of this but now if I run motion director these characters are going to have the animations applied to them and again this is make sure that you save before you do this but this is going to kind of process these but then if you watch these characters are going to kind of move along the path and so you can see how this is using those intelligent motions in order to animate those actors along a path like this and so um there there is a little bit of like collision avoidance going on so notice how these characters aren't like clipping through each other too too much um they are a little bit I've kind of jammed them in this smaller space right here but notice how it is animating those characters walking using those animations which is pretty cool now one thing that we didn't do that we probably should have is we did not set this is we did not set this to record those actions so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to do a shift click to select all of these and I'm going to set them to record and then I'm going to click on start and what that's going to do is that's going to record all of those movements to these different characters that are in here like this so you can see all of these people kind of walking along the path and they're even kind of like running into the end of the path and then turning around and walking the other way now again I've kind of like jammed all of these characters into a smaller space right here so obviously there's too many of them for the space that's in here but this is generating those movements well now if I click on the option for stop and I play my animation notice how that anim has been saved in here so you can use this in order to quickly create characters walking along a path in iclone all right so that's for in this video leave a comment below let me know what you think about this if you've tried these tools yet I just love having that conversation with you guys we'll continue talking more about the crowd features in iclone and future videos um if you are interested in checking out these tools I will link to those in the notes down below as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The Character Essentials

Views: 1,415

Keywords: iclone, iclone crowd, iclone crowd along path, iclone character path, iclone path simulation

Id: PLWOSdEz_wY

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023