Crowds in Blender are EASY with Procedural Crowds!

what's up guys Justin here with the CG essentials.com so in today's video we're going to check out an awesome new add-on for creating procedural crowds and blender let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so procedural crowds is a new add-on from diffuse studio and this is a tool that's basically designed to help you create procedural crowds that do different things I really like the way that they've set this one up it's super easy to use and it's super fast to add groups of people to your models and So currently this tool comes with more than 20 different models with some different variations and other things like that so it comes with model types or people models that you can use in order to generate these crowds there's multiple different kinds of crowds you can create from like standing blocks of people to people standing in a circle um crowds that follow along a curve so you can actually animate them walking along a curve as well as some really cool Tools in here for um doing things like random walking that actually uses collisions and filling in things like stadiums with seated models so in addition these character models also come with different animations so there's like cheering animations walk animations other things like that you can also add individual human models out of this Library as well so two other things that are worth noting from their procedural crowds tutorial on their page is in the comments they've noted that they're planning on releasing packs with different 3D models with different themes as well as it sounds like there's some tutorials coming on how to add your own custom models to procedural crowds so as soon as we get some of that I'll make another follow-up video on that because I'd be really interested to see how you can add your own custom models to this tool but for now let's jump over into blender and take a look at what this can do so the way this works is when you first install it you want to make sure that you go into your preferences so this comes with two files it comes with the add-on file as levels and assets file and you want to make sure that you've installed and enabled the procedural crowds add-on in addition that assets folder that it comes with you want to make sure that you unzip it and then you select those assets using this option right here that's going to take the add-on and it's going to allow it to actually like link to that folder and bring the Assets in that we're looking for but now let's go ahead and let's take this and let's add a crap so I'm going to move my body model over here a little bit and so what I want to do is I want to add a crowd so you can do that by tapping the in key on your keyboard to pop out this window clicking on procedural crowds and so notice how right now if you click on this you get options for the different kinds of crowds that you can create so the first kind of crowd is an audience and so if I click on the add crowd button what that's going to do is that's going to add a number of different models in here that are standing as part of an audience and notice how if I was to come down here and click on the play button that these actually have kind of an idle standing animation associated with them so they're not just static models they also have this animation associated with them but if you click in your crowd settings you can do a number of different things in here so for example you can select the width and thickness of the number of people standing In This Crowd like this and I don't know that there's necessarily A limitation on how many people models you can put in here but you can use this to add a bunch of people really quickly note that there are also options in here to select or adjust how much space is in the crowd right so if you turn the personal space way down then notice how everybody's going to be packed together you can also use this to kind of like remove some people as well you can also adjust the probability of where people are going to be placed in here so you can also take crowds and you can give them a floor so if I place this floor right here notice how this is going to place those crowds along this surface right here so um in addition to being able to do things like floor you also have the ability to take an object and set it as the point of interest and so when you set it as a point of Interest what's going to happen is that crowd is going to turn to follow that object so you can animate crowds that kind of like watch things move along other things like that so I'm pretty slick system right here then I don't think I mentioned it but you can also toggle an idol or a cheering animation so if you toggle that cheering animation these people are going to cheer like they're at a concert or something like that so you can use this to animate that crowd doing that as well so the circle is going to do exactly what it sounds like it's going to add a group of people standing in a circle looking at a central point and you can adjust things like the radius you can adjust the thickness of the circle and then you can set how far along the circle these people are going to be using the trim Circle function so for example if you wanted all of these people standing here looking at someone talking or something like that you can set them around a point and you can use this in order to set if they're like fully around the circle or partially whatever you want and then these other options are pretty much the same you can set the probability the seed other things like that okay so this next option is going to do exactly what it sounds like it allows you to create a crowd that follows along a curve so say I had a bezier curve like this one but then if I select it click on add crowd what that's going to do is that's going to add a crowd that follows along this curve notice how if you click on the play button right here these people models are actually going to walk along this curve and you can set things like the speed that the people are walking like this you can also toggle if they're walking or running just by switching the different animations in here so um you can do that as well as setting things like the direction that the people are walking or running so you can use this in order to quickly animate people walking down streets or other things like that so you can add some randomization to the speed which is interesting because some of the people models are going to walk faster than others so the March function is basically going to be a lot like the follow curve but it's going to give you more control over the crowd that's created right so notice how in this case I selected a curve but these people are all kind of in lines right they're not random so you can use this to animate people marching like this and then you can adjust things like their speed again but notice how this gives you the ability to add like rows and Columns of people and then if you do decide that you want to add some randomization in here and notice how there's kind of some randomization options like this that you can use in order to randomize where people are but this one basically gives you more control over the people that are created along your path all right so the random walk system is going to let you create a crowd of humans that it starts off looking like this and it's kind of funny but when you hit play what it's going to do is it's going to use the void system in order to generate this crowd and what's going to happen is this crowd is going to walk or follow after a goal that you set so notice how I can take this goal and I can set it up so these people actually follow along with it like this now you can't come into the crowd and adjust things like the speed that people are walking other things like that so if I take this goal and move it notice how those people are still going to follow along with it so you can also not only do that app but you can also set up collisions and then let's say that you wanted them to walk like through objects or something like that or have actual collisions you can select the object you can select the people and click on set collision and what that's going to do is now they're going to walk towards the goal but notice how if they run into a wall they're actually going to turn and go elsewhere so notice how you can set this up where that crowd is actually going to walk through gaps and actually collide with things inside your model so this last one is super interesting to me it's the stadium and what the stadium does is it allows you to take a surface right so this is just a cube that I've kind of scaled down at the bottom and up at the top but if I click on add crowd that's actually going to come in here and that's going to add a crowd along that surface and one of the crazy things about this is if I click on play these people are animated right so they're actually like cheering they're looking at the middle of this model right here so if you want to animate a crowd in the background of something you can do that use using this tool and so you can use this to adjust things like the probability of people being in the crowd right so if you don't want this to be like 100 full or something like that you can adjust this you can also adjust the scale of the people a little bit so everything doesn't look a hundred percent uniform all right and then finally you've also got the ability to add individual humans in here and they've got a collection of high poly and low poly both men and women so let's say I want to add a high poly model in here I can select from The Collection that they have so we'll go with this one right here click on ADD human that's actually going to add that person model in here and so you can add this character and then if I click on the Armature notice how we can add some of the animations so let's say we wanted one of the idle animations you can click on ADD animation I'm just going to say use existing but then you can click down here and you can select that animation right here so notice how you're getting that idle animation for this model in here you can add multiple different models so for example let's say I wanted to add one of the women models the high poly and so we'll just go with this one so we're going to click on ADD human and when you move these by the way you're going to want to make sure that you select both the person and the Armature to move them both out of the way but now we've got this human model in here like this so you can click on that Armature and do the same thing right so let's say we wanted to add that cheering animation uh we'll go ahead and we'll use the existing then I'm going to click in here and select the cheering zero one and it's going to apply this cheering animation to this model so you can use this to uh basically add the individual models in here and animate them if you decide that you want to do that in addition to the crowds alright so personally I think this is a great tool for adding groups of people into your models I'm super excited to see what that workflow is going to be for adding those custom models in here as well but this tool set is really good at least in my opinion for adding those different groups leave a comment down below let me know what you think and I'll link to the add-on on this page as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 35,800

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender crowds, blender stadium, blender procedural crowds, blender procedural crowds add-on

Id: 9Dq4dO4VVng

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023