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Let's explore the larger than life world of Crowds in Houdini! The best thing I love about Crowds in Houdini is the performance speed on the computer. You can get blazing fast speeds with large scale scene filled with dozens to hundreds of agents walking about in your scene and it still won't choke. The secret to all this is Houdini's special packed primitives and packed agent primitives, it makes your Crowd scenes so fast! Join me in this mini-series where we'll explore how to setup a simple Crowd scene and how to bring in your own custom-made Kine-FX characters into Crowds or maybe you bought a character online and would like to convert it into a Crowd scene!


Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqovuMX-teVP15t-e4zaLsiuA0Mzz5qyx

Crowd Simulation Basic Concept #1 Simple Setup
The Most Basic Setup for Crowds in Houdini. I don't think you can get more basic than this.
Crowd Simulation Basic Concept #2 Character States & Animations
Adding animations to the characters in the Crowd simulation in Houdini really makes a scene come alive. You can easily create large scenes with Crowds making for a very busy and urban look. I'll include the Baseball scene shown at the beginning of this video in the HIP and some animations that I motion captured, the baseball pitch and batting animations.
Crowd Simulation Basic Concept #3 Avoidance
How do you prevent Crowd Agents from colliding with each other in a Crowd Simulation in Houdini? The answer is Avoidance! But it doesn’t work the same way as you might think it does with RBD Collisions. In this video lesson, I explore how Avoidance works in Houdini’s Crowd Solver.
Crowd Simulation Basic Concept #4 Custom Character Rig & Animations
In this video, I demonstrate how to add custom animations to your character, animations that you either made yourself one keyframe at a time or bought online or downloaded from mixamo. We'll then convert it into a Crowd Agent and you'll get to attach your custom animations to Crowd States and Agents.
Crowd Simulation Basic Concept #5 In Place and Locomotive Animations
In this video, I demonstrate how you can fix the origin and pivot point of character animations for Crowd Agents in Houdini. Some animations contain movement data that tells Houdini and the Crowd Solver where the character is moving or when the character stops in place briefly for complex motions, like fighting actions and being hit feedback motions. If Houdini and the Crowd Solver doesn't know about these, it'll just treat it as a constant moving character causes unpredictable results. Here I'll show you how to fix this issue and get more realistic results out of your animations.
Crowd Simulation Basic Concept #6A Crowd Triggers
In this video, I demonstrate how to setup Crowd Triggers using the Animation States that were shown in previous videos.
Crowd Simulation Basic Concept #6B More Crowd Triggers
In this video, I continue on from the previous Crowd Basic Concept #6A on Crowd Triggers. I'll be adding more Crowd Triggers and explaining how to set them up and how each trigger affects neighboring triggers.
Crowd Simulation Basic Concept #6C Target Selective Agents in Crowd SIM
In this video, I'm going to demonstrate how you can target specific agents in the Crowd SIM in Houdini and apply specific Crowd Triggers for full control! We'll organize the agents and give them unique attributes to be used in the Crowd SIM.
Crowd Simulation Basic Concept #6D VEX in Crowd SIM
This is the last video in Concept 6! But there will be more Crowd Simulation Concept videos to come soon! I'm going to take a short break from Crowds just for the next video because Concept #6 took a lot out of me, but I'll be back with Concept 7 very soon! In this video, I finally dive into some simple VEX in Crowds and demonstrate how to do simple calculations during runtime to dynamically guide your Crowd agents. These techniques can be used in your own Crowd scenes in different ways and I hope you'll find the stuff useful in your own projects!

CREATED BY

bubblepins
BUBBLE PINS

Transitioning from a coder to a 3D artist. Houdini was the best option for me after I explored a different number of 3D software applications. I love the procedural workflow in Houdini and how easily accessible the attributes of the geometry are available to the user. This makes it a lot easier to focus on creating a good render and less time wasted on trying to figure out how to access certain geometry points or edges.

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COMMENTS

  • MirHadi 1 year, 8 months ago  | 

    I appreciate all the effort you have put into this.
    If possible please provide more videos about crowd simulations.
    Thank you again.

    • skadbone1 1 year, 6 months ago  | 

      Hi and thanks for this!-I look forward to watching the whole series, since I was actually looking for something like this. Where can I please find the files, I use 19.5.716 and 19.5.752. Thank you, Craig

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