Cycling animation cycles

[midicon]

Hi guys, I'm trying to come up with a solution to cycle through animation cycles and instance them onto points. 

Basically I have a few alembic animation cycles (exported from maya). They all loop seamlessly. They are a butterfly waking up and taking off. The first cycle is: opening his wings and getting into position 1. The second is a resting state, minor wing movements, and staying alive. and the third is a flutter and take off.

The idea is to populate the butterfly onto points, have them cycle through the animations, and then have the points fly away taking the butterfly with them (on the third fly away cycle). I am just having problems coming up with a nice and neat solution for having these cycle through the animations. Idealy it would be great if I can find a way to have control to stay in the second state a bit longer on some then others. I hope this makes sense. If anyone has any idea this would be fantastic!!

Thanks in advance

 

Rob   

[Atom]

Something like this might work in this case. A series of blendshape nodes to cross faded at the correct time. Or just switch the next animation on at the right time.

If you follow up a File or Agent node with a TimeWarp you can effectively remap the length of the animation, cycle or hold it. This means you could place your final fly away animation with a hold on the start and a cycle on the end.

Edited September 14, 2017 by Atom

[midicon]

WOW thanks for the quick reply!! This is a nice solution I'm defiantly going to give it a try. I would love to use the crowd tools although I have never. Do I need the rig to bake out an agent? or could I just bake out the alembic geo as an agent and skip the collision joints and configure joints steps?

Thanks again 

 

Rob 

[cwhite]

The collision geometry / configure joints tools are never mandatory - they are only needed for ragdolls.

Agent primitives support either static shapes (attached to an animated transform) or bone deformation.