Procedural animation of a character

[AntoineSfx]

Hi,

I would like to know if Houdini (Indie) is be the right tool to achieve what follows. I have a programming background, and I studied theoretical computer graphics, from a programmer's point of view, not an animator / artist.

Given a character ( a biped), I would like to move it along a path. There are obstacles along the path, and the character should switch to various animation cycles when needed.

For example, if I set up a plane with a box, and a path which goes through the box, I would like the character to go through the correct animations cycles automatically, i.e walking, climbing, walking, climbing down, and then walking.

I know this can be achieved with a finite state machine (for choosing when to branch out from an animation cycle to another) and collision detection, in theory.

Now, is Houdini the right tool to do this, or should I use another software ?

 

I have no doubt it can be achieved with Houdini, but the question is: how would you, as animators, approach this ?

Thanks for reading !

(BTW English is not my first language.)

[Atom]

Sounds like a task for the Crowd simulator. Basically you would need to pre-animate the various motions your character needs to take then using the states within the crowd system migrate between them.

[stickman]

2 hours ago, AntoineSfx said:

how would you, as animators, approach this ?

I really am an animator, to the exclusion of much - if any - technical skills. Unlike most of the wizards around here. (I'm looking at you, Atom!)
And I agree... try the crowd simulator.

  Antoine, are you perchance from inria? They were doing fantastic NPR research.

[konstantin magnus]

Depending on the type of result you want to achieve, I would also look at realtime engines such as Unity or Unreal. E.g. in Unity its called Mechanim.

Edited December 28, 2016 by konstantin magnus

[AntoineSfx]

22 hours ago, stickman said:

  Antoine, are you perchance from inria? They were doing fantastic NPR research.

No I am not from INRIA, but that course that I took (one semester) was taught by a brilliant Chilean post doctorate who was at that time, at the local branch of INRIA in the city where I was studying. He also came from MIT.  (I'm not in academia -- I don't know why he was there). We also worked on implementing a parts of a ray tracer in C++.. I also secretly worshiped another INRIA guy but not for his NPR research, but his juggling skills.