Crowd simulation problems
#1
New user, I love this so far, and it seems surprisingly intuitive! Thanks Ty! I was messing about foe ages trying to get something like this working in Pflow and have made more progress in one afternoon than I ever did with that.

I'm trying to build some sort of procedural crowd that will scale to large areas without repeating, and will disperse with some fairly convincing grouping characteristics. I know the way I've seem crowd done on tutorials is with the 3DS biped, but I've already got these characters I created in mixamo animated with c.30 frame walking loop. I have about 6 of these characters so far, but trying to get this working with just one for now and have a few questions I'm stuck on:

1. Instance IDs can be utilized by certain VRay texmaps to differentiate between particles independently from material IDs.

Which Vray textmaps can this interact with? A fairly fundamental part of the randomization will be the character's clothes colours. I was doing this previously with instances using the Corona colour map. It just needs to be a randomised diffuse colour which will then feed in to a composite map. I've tried all modes on the VrayMultiSubTex and they all produce a single colour or by face ID (as in the image below).

2. Multiple multi/sub materials. Each one of these characters currently has a multi/sub material consisting of about 6 IDs for the various clothing/skin/hair etc. What would be a suitable way to combine these characters under the same TyFlow object? Do I need to need to combine all those materials into one mega multisub material and just keep track of the materials or would multiple systems be a better idea?

Scene attached for reference


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#2
Hey,

Currently Instance IDs only apply to VRay Instance particles. Actor skinned mesh particles are not treated as instances and thus the Instance ID settings will have no effect.

Quote:Do I need to need to combine all those materials into one mega multisub material and just keep track of the materials

Unfortunately this is currently your only option, due to some limitations in the way max handles meshes internally. If you check the roadmap you can see that better actor material randomization is on the todo.
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#3
Got it! Thanks!I wonder if you could point my in the direction of any tutorials on crowd behavior? I'm using the Flock operator currently but I'm not sure it's really the correct thing


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