Crowds in tyflow, jump up on obstacles, rotation, etc

[pjkw]

We want to create a crowd simulation in tyflow. Generally we're facing two problems.
The first is that the surface is uneven with some 90 degree walls that we would like the actors to jump up on. No need to have an actual jump animation but we need to particles to smoothly move up as if they jumped, the same goes for the actors going down but that is easily handled with some collision and gravity.

The 2nd problem is somewhat related, when we add some randomness to their movement we want them to rotate accordingly (rotate: travel direction).
The problem here is that when a particle moves "jumps down" it snaps from facing down into the ground (while in free fall) and then back to horizontal in 1 frame, not a very nice look. How can we smooth this out, or even remove the rotation in that axis, just having them rotate left/right and not up/down would be enough.

[tyFlow]

The jumping would have to be triggered by an event or operator filtering particles that come in proximity with the wall. For the greatest amount of control, you'd want to use a Script operator, which has raycasting abilities and such. For each actor you'd cast rays forward until the rays hit a wall within a certain proximity...then particles are output to a jumping event or whatever.

Rotation smoothness can be handled with the Rotation operator interpolation setting. Lower that down and rotations will be interpolated over multiple frames...no more snapping.