Instancing (crowd animation)

[kumpa]

I have rigged character with animation (in place) and another character with simple chopnet to fetch animation from the other one and loop it. I made particle system with randomised Cd ® to offset animation cycle in chopnet with. But the problem is that animation cycles are all in the same phase....what the heck am i doing wrong ? See attached file.

cheers

k

ant.zip

[anim]

you cannot use instancepoint() to modify geometry because the main idea of point instancing is to have only one geometry in memory and use it on many points with only object level modifications (transforms, materials, visibility)

(so you can at best have several different geos in subnet and just change visibility per instancepoint() to have appearance of modifying geometry, this is not your case of course)

your scene is working perfectly on object level

turn off display flag on Ant1/ant obj

and turn on display flag on all Ant1 bones also check Renderable checkbox

now render your scene and you can see that the bones are transformed per instance as you expect

so only thing that does not work is SOP level deformation of the ant with the bones and that makes sense

you have 2 options:

1.) break your ant into joints and parent each to corresponding bone, that should work with point instancing

2.) leave everything as it is, but use copystamping to generate different ant geometry per point

but since your ant is made from separated meshes I'd go for 1.

[kumpa]

hi bud !

What you are saying makes a lot of sense, but:

1. If i break it into pieces, would that chopnet doing animation lookup still get evaluated ?

2. How do you do copy stamping on object level ?

cheers

k

[anim]

1. If i break it into pieces, would that chopnet doing animation lookup still get evaluated ?

if every piece will be separate Geometry object paranted to the corresponding bone then yes

you can even use your current bone objects and just change their geometry at sop level to corresponding ant part

2. How do you do copy stamping on object level ?

not on object level, but evaluating bone transforms on per copy basis

simply by copying the captured ant geometry but changing it's rig by copystamping

look at attached file

i haven't created example for the 1st method because it's a little hand work and i think you should get it from the description, but i encourage you to try the 1st method also because it is more memory efficient if you have large number of instances or heavy meshes

Ant_copystamping.rar

[kumpa]

You are amazing buddy !

Thank You