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Autonomous Character Plug-In.
BioGraphic Technologies brings crowd control to Maya
ANIMATING CROWDS, or large groups of anything, for that matter, is a problem for animators. Crowds represent a combination of controlled and random motion. Each member of a crowd has individual motions, but at a higher level these motions average out so that the crowd itself has its own motion. At a rock concert, for example, most people are in their seats facing the stage, even though some mill about the aisles looking for the restroom.
To help animators face the challenge of controlling these quasi-random motions, BioGraphic Technologies offers its Autonomous Character Plug-In for Alias/Wavefront's Maya. The software currently works only with the Windows version of Maya, though the company is pondering ports to other Maya platforms, and promising versions for other 3D packages such as NewTek's LightWave and Discreet's 3ds max.
The Autonomous Character Plug-In enables animators to use an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to create natural-looking animations of large groups of characters that interact with each other and their environment. It works in conjunction with Maya's dynamics system, which normally makes objects react to physical forces such as wind and gravity. With the Autonomous Character Plug-In, the animator gets to write the rules to make each character behave as required. When the animator applies these behaviors to many characters, the result looks like a realistic crowd.
Two types of characters are defined by the plug-in: autonomous and non-autonomous. Autonomous characters are those we generally think of as characters, whereas non-autonomous characters are simply objects in a scene. In an animation of characters running down the street, for example, the runners would be autonomous characters, while the streetlights and mailboxes would be non-autonomous characters (or objects) to be avoided.
The interface centers around Maya's channel box, which means that it is mostly text-based, and therefore a bit difficult to navigate. Other crowd control software, such as Discreet's character studio, has a visual scene graph that enables you to script the behavior of a character or a group using a flow chart analogy. I think something like this would be a good addition because it would allow more control over each character.
Much like game authoring software, the plug-in uses a state engine to keep the characters alive and moving. ...
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