adding skinned agent layers

[jheffel]

I'm currently working on a crowd agent with a skirt like object that will need cloth sim for the agents close to camera. I would like to have some agents that have a skinned version of the skirt without simulation to use in the background, and the others to have nothing there so the simulated cloth can be rendered over it later.  Essentially I was hoping to do this by having one agent layer with the skirt, and one without it in the same agent.

I already have the skirt skinned on my rig so am able to export that as the 'default' agent layer, I then made a duplicate of the rig, removed the skirt and tried baking it as a new layer to disk.  I can see both the 'default.lay' and 'skirt.lay' on disk. When I try to load the agent in my scene though it only will show the layer that was last baked out as selectable,  If I bake out one layer it makes the other unusable (reloaded the agent as well).

I've been able to successfully add some static objects as new agent layers parented to certain joints, but am not sure how to add a new skinned skirt agent layer, or to remove the skirt in a new layer.

Currently the only way I can see around this is to create the skirt variations as different agents?  I might have to go down this route, but it would be really beneficial to be able to use the agent edit node to simply switch the agent layers when I want to add cloth sims at the end to the agents close to camera

Any ideas on how I could accomplish this?

 

[dansidi]

Hi,

I did something similar to what you are trying to do, I think.

I wanted a crowd agent to wave a flag and to have that flag simmed as a Vellum object.
That's kind of what you are attempting, if I understand you correctly.

I added flag geo, as a layer, and then simmed it as Vellum, after the crowd sim.
There is a SideFX workflow tutorial on this ("AttachingCloth to Agents" in the help system)

The trick is to have the cloth packed into the agent when you are defining the agent, then when you run your crowd simulation, you then Unpack the cloth using the Agent Vellum Unpack node and connect the output of that through the Vellum solver.

Plese take a look at my little write-up on my web site. I go throuah all the steps.

http://www.crowd-effects.com/2020/06/flag-waving-crowd-agents-in-houdini.html

 

Edited June 10, 2020 by dansidi

[jheffel]

Thanks Daniel,  I had already run into your post with the flags, was very helpful!

I believe I've found a way to get the setup I was looking for:

• I exported the fully skinned layer using the agent out node
• located the 'default.lay' file and duplicate and rename to 'noskirt.lay'
• edit the noskirt.lay file in text editor
  • change 'name' to 'noskirt'
  • removed the entry for my skirt mesh under 'deforming'

This results in me getting a 'default' and a 'noskirt' layer that I can swap between.  So now I can use the default layer for most of my agents, and swap to the 'noskirt' agents for the ones I run the full cloth simulation on!

[dansidi]

Hi Jamie,

I've been working on this today and think I have a simple method.

I make a little write-up for my website, please take a look and see if it helps you.

http://www.crowd-effects.com/2020/06/agent-preparation-with-skinned-clothing.html

 

[Sankar Kumar]

On 6/13/2020 at 1:15 AM, dansidi said:

Hi Jamie,

I've been working on this today and think I have a simple method.

I make a little write-up for my website, please take a look and see if it helps you.

http://www.crowd-effects.com/2020/06/agent-preparation-with-skinned-clothing.html

 

Seems broken link, Any help..