Hi guys,

I have an army of warriors all holding a spear and shield. I've set up a trigger to activate a fleeing/run clip, but it would be great to have the fleeing warriors throw down their weapons and shields.
There are dozens of tutorials detailing how to set up props for crowds' agents, but I can't find anything showing how I might get them to release or drop their props. Is this a complicated endeavor (probably a silly question to ask in a Houdini forum :-P)?
Can anybody share or point me to a way to achieve this please?
Thanks

B

If the props are part of the agent's geometry, I think you'd want to make sure you have a separate prop joint so that the shield can move independently from the hand joint when it separates.
Then if you want to drop the shield via the ragdoll solver, you could switch to a partial ragdoll state where the prop joint is active but the rest of the character is following your animation clip. If the prop joint is parented to other joints in the skeleton you would also need to remove the Bullet constraint that's holding it together in the ragdoll sim (this is basically the same idea as detaching limbs from a ragdoll https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/crowds/ragdoll.html#detaching-limbs-advanced)

Thanks Chris I will take a look.