Started the day of by looking at forums on how people would start off with crowd simulations in Houdini. I saw that they used pops and sops in their methods. I then went on to refresh my knowledge on POP and SOP networks.
I looked at this tutorial to see how to set up a simple crowd simulation. It didnt work the way I expected it to be. Truthfully while I was working on this, I did not really know what was happening or what I was doing. I guess I did not really understand the operators as much as I should yet.
Overall Setup of Simulation
Particles generate and fly in a direction
Nodes I used
I found an interesting crowd simulation work on vimeo. Seems fitting since it's about war and a typical shot of two forces battling. It would be nice to see them interact though, well i've got LOTR to reference for that.
Also looked around odforce to find this thread. It looks more into intelligent movement for the agents, though I found it hard to understand a pretty nice crowd sim one of the users posted. Mr Douglas came in today and I showed him the hip file the forum user provided, he also said that it'd be difficult for people to get it without knowing much about DOPs ,SOPs and VOPs. Its kind of complex.
Screencaps of the hip file the forum user posted
Screencaps of the hip file the forum user posted
For today though, I focused more on understanding the POP network and its tools.I went around searching about crowd simulations in Houdini and found that I should first understand particle operators such as interact pop, creep pop, follow pop, attractor pop and others.
I made a simple setup of 2 lines at different ends of a grid. Changed the number of points of the lines to increase the number of points (ofcourse). I also created an Add operator to create a single point. What I wanted to do was to play around and understand the pop operators in the pop network. I made the points from the two lines follow the single point with a follow operator in the POP network. I color differentiated the points for easy viewing. The single red point is the leader, the other two groups of points are green or blue. I also added a sphere in the middle to add as an obstacle. Thus, I added a collision operator onto each of the point sources and set them up to slide upon collision. Im still not that happy with how they collide with the sphere, still need to try to make it look smoother.
Overall placement of points
Points start to move and follow the leader
Points collide and slide along sphere
Points collide and slide along sphere
The nodes in the POP network
No comments:
Post a Comment