Refining the Reactions

Animation Tutorials

Getting Started with Crowds

 

Autodesk 3ds Max Tutorials > Animation Tutorials > 

Animating Crowds

This tutorial covers a range of techniques used with the 3ds Max crowd-animation features for creating and animating crowds. Crowd animation starts out with behaviors applied to delegates, which serve as stand-ins for crowd members. Next, that motion is applied to mesh objects or bipeds. These objects might carry their own animation, which can be combined with the delegate animation in a variety of ways. In the final part of this tutorial, you'll learn how to use motion synthesis to apply different parts of a mesh object's animation to each crowd member, based on its current behavior.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to:

• Create the Crowd system building blocks: the Crowd and Delegate helper objects.
• Apply behaviors to delegates so the Crowd system can animate them.
• Use cognitive controllers to change delegate behavior dynamically during the crowd simulation.
• Apply crowd simulation to non-bipedal characters. In the final lesson, you'll animate a flock of eagles flying around an arbitrary shape, using motion synthesis and the Vector Field space warp. They flap their wings as they ascend, and glide as they descend or fly horizontally.

Skill level: Beginner to Intermediate

Time to complete: 2 hours