“CROWDS ARE HERE… CROWDS ARE HERE…”

Hi all,

After a couple of projects involving crowds and flocks, it was clear to me that Houdini had everything to become the new crowd software, but besides just brains as sopsolvers, the whole pipeline/framework had to be built to be able to deal with characters in a fast way! ( SOP-speed that is), along with proper rendering tools (custom instancer). That's what i did over the last couple of months and am happy to announce it:


Fast, fully customizable crowds are available in Houdini with the upcoming release of the CROWDIGY 1.0 ( codename) plug-in/Framework

No CHOPs, no copy SOP… only current VEX/C++ speed ! Built upon more than 30+ otls.
Demo: http://vimeo.com/112054883 [vimeo.com]
( WATCH IN HD!!! or download - working on a better/richer version).

Currently Includes/Features:

- Crowd DSO (Mantra): character deformation happens DYNAMICALLY AT RENDERTIME (currently porting the code to Renderman and Arnold ) -
- Ragdoll module (made with Bullet) happening in sync with crowd solving
-Action editing module, action graph ( fully editable as geometry to handle action choosing, transitions, blends etc. processed at VEX speed of course),
-Works with arbitrary skeletons, actions are saved in a custom format ( no CHOPs i said ). Skeletons can be imported as .bvh and are converted into our own format
-Full Artficial Intelligence Module ( aka “brains”): Comes with a lot of predefined agent “inputs” ( Vision, Terrain adaptation, Flocking etc …).
A cool one is the Path Finding SOP (Djikstra/A*-like pathfinding), built upon the uber-awesome-and-remarkably-fast Shortest Path SOP),
Of course you can define your own brains using all the array of of VEX and SOPs tools
-Entirely integrated with the rest of Houdini : cloth, particle, any DOPs are accessible at each timestep…( see the coupling with particle sims at the beginning of the video)
( and much much more to come but hush!)

And of course:
DEPLOY YOUR CROWDS IN MAYA,3DSMAX, CINEMA4D, UNITY, etc.. through the Houdini Engine (populate, invade, spread or colonize ..)

The official commercial release is expected end of 2014, on Orbolt. The plan is to have it under closed beta at first.
Compatible with Houdini 11 to 13 ( only 13 for ragdoll module)

So much more i have to say, but i will keep it short to start with… ( currently putting together a 1hr overview video )
Any questions: shoot a mail at houdinicrowdsolutions@gmail.com

Not sure if SideFx has something cooking for Houdini 14, but i wanted to do it anyway, and couldn't wait ha ha . i had thought the infrastructure through in great lengths before i went ahead and actually implemented it - to make it the most versatile, algorithmically fast, conceptually simple, the most “houdini-esque”. I hope it is
Will be looking for nice mocap and rich rigs to make even more pictures…

(did i tell you i even made my own mocap with a Kinect sensor.. it's not entirely there but it's really really promising)

P.S

You asked about speed:
It includes a live speed test on a rather poor machine! 6GB Ram/Core Duo/512Mb Vram cough cough! Comparing it to Fabric Engine for instance is meaningless, Houdini hasn't got GPU acceleration yet. And i wonder how much time it would take for them to code everything.. Let's only compare what can be compared.

1/3 sec per frame for 1000 characters ( 50+ actions) for pure solving and display
2 sec/frame for 100 characters with Bullet solving

-d

Looks Amazing!

first of all thats a suprise david :-)

it looks promising and i congratulate for the work what you have done.

whats the priceplan for the orbolt store?

Hi,

Price is not set yet.
What i can say already is that it will be cheaper than the other commercial solutions ( Massive/Golaem/Miarmy), even if it can do more ( mostly because it lives inside Houdini)

I need to see how big the demand isout there.

Also, it's been made in separate modules and will be also sold in modules ( so you don't have to buy everything):


The main components are:
1)The “action-prepping module” that converts Houdini skeletons into custom skeletons, build the actions file(s) out of mocap +it's where you build the action graph
2)The crowd solver
3)The dedicated ragdoll solver
4)The procedural


We can imagine that users that don't have Houdini 13 buy only 1,2 and 4
or people who want to output to another renderer ( until i release the
Render/Arnold procedurals) will not buy 4 and instead write their bgeo -> rib exporter f.ex in Python )
The “pre-built brains” ( vision, flocking, pathfinding etc) components are going to be free, i want this part to be free.

Outstanding work David !

Rob

hey david thank you for the information.

small question. did sidefx know that you make a crowd system? because there is a comment on the orbolt request list under the crowd request. if not then they cook something.

It's my experience on projects involving crowds and flocks( Invictus, Ender's Game) which got me studying the subject rather in depth from boids to action-based , and finding the best unifying framework for all that.

I haven't asked or told anyone, no, hoping to make some money out of this: i've always wanted to do this anyway, and learned a billion things in doing it ( from hardcore HDK C++, skeleton/action representation, motion capture which i went ahead and did myself -yey!-, and much much more ).

Many small and limited crowds setups have been developed over the years, some using pre-cached geo with delayed load, but i think never a full solution as complete as Massive or Miarmy, like i did.
Crowds are in the air, so much in the air that i've always wondered why they were'nt there yet. Apart from the ragdoll side of things which uses bullet, all that i've developed could have been done 5 years ago within Houdini.

Yep the lack of comment from them is weird. I wasn't included in the alpha/beta if there was any, so i dunno.

If they're cooking something, it will have to have GPU acceleration, otherwise i would say it's not really a “novelty”, it's just something built on top of what they already have ( except the DSO). I expect more from them, especially on the “harder core” side ( especially the GPU side of things) which is now an absolute priority if they want to compete with Fabric Engine which is catching up rapidly on the nodal representation of scenes and algorithms and has a killer “Horde” system.
It has PEX which is GPU-accelerated and is like VEX and produces amazing performance for crowds among other things ( and PEX has visual graph representation, so they have VOPs too) . Again, if they go this way, they have to also rethink entirely their character pipeline and completely “Vexify” it like Fabric Engine has done. I also started doing that. Serious highly photorealistic crowds now mean complex rigs and not just linear skinning, but also muscle, lattice etc. This can all be done in VEX too, which my stuff is doing, and is doing at rendertime!!! , and which to my knowledge is lacking for the “competition”( Massive/Miarmy).

Not to mention motion retargeting in CHOPs which people have been requesting for years and which becomes extemely handy to produce movement variety.
If they can have all that, then that's awesome!

ah yes found the comment you were talking about

gonna talk to them to find out more
“a large tool effort”, as they say, indeed it's a whole pipeline in general that needs to be thought through. very curious about how they approached it. anway, that's cool !