Crowd Agents walking from A to B and transitioning to a standing state?

[probiner]

Hi
Working on crowd setup where agents walk to gather and stack up around a perimeter. Instead of leaving it all to sim, I thought of defining a start position for the crowd source and the end position for POP Steer Seek. The delta between them will give me the orientation.
 
 

The idea would be to have a state transition close to B from walk to a standing state. But I'm having issues with putting it to practice.

1) Unlike POP Steer Wander where you can define it as 2D, POP Steer Seek doesn't have such option and some agents seem to go up and down even though all the target points are on the ground plane.

2) Agents are not stopping at the target point even with "Arrival" turned on. They just walk by the targets and later come back.

3) So I'm triggering the transition with proximity to a standing state with a POP Velocity set to 0. But unlike POP Steer Seek, Crowd Trigger doesn't have "id" pairing. So any point that is in the way of an agent will trigger the stop as you can see with the 2nd from the right stopping at a point on its path. More over they only seem stop a bit after the detection, not on the target point. Another thing about Crowd Trigger is that it seems to not play well with points that do not belong to a prim, hence the spheres. The lines are there for illustrating purposes.

4) You can see the legs staying behind because "Foot Locking" is turned on, but once the rest is fixed I think this will be as well.

Is the main idea sound? If so how can I have a proper animation from A to B with a state transition that stays on the target point?
Attaching a scene showing the issue with the Seek, stoppage and transition.

Thanks

Crowd_Test_Seek_Stop.hiplc

Edited August 24, 2018 by probiner

[Atom]

I find re-timing the clip and locomotion to be funky.

Here is a slight change to your setup that just uses goal points to seek a location. You can adjust goal detection distance in the crowdtrigger. Braking is still available in the seek as well. When retime is on, other nodes like PopSteerSeek arrival, seem to lose the ability to alter velocity, because it is managed by crowd state nodes (or the solver).

 

ap_Crowd_Test_Seek_Stop.hiplc

Edited August 25, 2018 by Atom

[probiner]

@Atom Glad you could look into it.

I ended recurring to VEX to trigger the state in a similar way, but not as clean as yours. Thanks! I don't need to use DOPs usually, and was indeed expecting to rely more on operators and less on VEX, but glad such knowledge is useful here too, ehehe.

My mistake for letting the second clip at In-Place, while the first was set to Locomotive. I'm using the latter as things seems to be better time, but good catch on the "Arrival" not working because of it!

Starting to think is that foot locking requires better transition setup since feet seem to be staying behind on them regardless of configurations.

About the overall idea, here's where I'm at: https://streamable.com/w8n6h

Cheers

Edited August 25, 2018 by probiner