Inspired by another topic here I thought I'd try exporting a crowd from 3DS Max and it ain't working well.

The first (most likely biggest) problem is that bringing them into XChange the people are all standing at various angles, as if the pivot point is incorrect.  I assume this is something to do with the FBX settings (because you sure don't want to have to adjust the pivot of each and every person in your crowd in XChange) but I can't figure out where this would be.

Secondly, the animation is very weird -- I choose "Perform" and then the animation and the characters just kind of rock back and forth on that weird pivot point.  The animation is this way in XChange so I'm guessing that somehow I'm not exporting it correct (again, perhaps the export settings).  Anyone have a clue as to what steps exactly I have to do to make this all work?

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Alienware Aurora R12, Win 10, i9-119000KF, 3.5GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090 (24GB), Samsung 960 Pro 4TB M-2 SSD, TB+ Disk space
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Ah, nevermind -- answered my own question with a bit more interweb searching.

Apparently in order for this to work you need to bake the animation inside of Max by first selecting all the crowd figures and then using the Maxscript command pop.bakeselpeople() (you can issue this inside of a listener without writing a whole script).  Then exporting works fine.

It sure makes a TON of figures, though -- I'm not so sure this really saves memory if you are using the high resolution textures (low resolution, yes, but they don't look very good up close).

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Alienware Aurora R12, Win 10, i9-119000KF, 3.5GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090 (24GB), Samsung 960 Pro 4TB M-2 SSD, TB+ Disk space
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

For crowds in iclones the regular mesh kinds they need to be props and clones of each other so they share the same resources so like 1 crowd of 5 or something and copy it 20 times.    

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"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Dr. Seuss

unless it's been improved in max 2016, it really doesn't go far.
very limited options.

i have groups  of 140 or so and can have 4-5 dupes in a scene np
on a outdated machine with low ram and cheap vid card

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Warlord gave small crowds in various configurations away as a Xmas freebie (created in 3DS Max), and they are quite nice. It had me interested, but it's only available in the more expensive 3D packages (3DS Max, full Maya, and Cinema 4D Studio). It would be great if it could work in Maya LT. I can see particles being useful in some cases, but I would like to have more control. For example, I need a crowd that is perusing the wares in a market.

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I'm using Max 2015 and the crowd stuff is pretty limited -- you can't, for example, have folks running away from things (like if a monster was attacking) as the best you can do is have folks jog (most folks don't jog away from monsters :>.  And getting people not to use cell phones is a PITA (which then means, of course, that you need to PUT the cell phones in, as otherwise they just have their hands up to their heads).

It's pretty good for backgrounds as long as they are FAR in the background -- otherwise it just doesn't blend well with iClone's own characters and the actions are, as I said, simplistic and repetitive.  But at least it's something, and fast to generate and fun to play around with.

We still need crowd particles in iClone, particularly if we could then assign different animations to selected figures.  And, yes, this could be done in third party stuff like AE or other compositing software, but anytime you leave the iClone environment you get into other issues like camera movement (because we can't export cameras from iClone you'd have to track the scene in AE, which is another PITA).

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Alienware Aurora R12, Win 10, i9-119000KF, 3.5GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090 (24GB), Samsung 960 Pro 4TB M-2 SSD, TB+ Disk space
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Probably for close up I would decimate a CC character down.  I farted with this awhile back but they decimate very easily.    Of course you then would need to rerig but i am assuming most animations could still work.   I can get a cc character down below 5k polygons for the body and I would remove the inner mouth and then decimate the clothes down.     Of course this takes time LOL.   However still we would need particles.  The idea being you can mix them up a bit.  A true crowd well my idea .. which probably is more like a stampede can really only be done the particle way, but I would then like a set of low poly mesh people for wandering around.    

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"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Dr. Seuss

this vid always cracked me up
miarmy



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rofl yeah I want to have some large people herds like that maybe larger  
I dont know how useful that is but i enjoy silly things like that LOL

I want my people to do this (very pie in the sky but this is what is inside my head when I think of crowds lol)





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"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Dr. Seuss

only 5 made it through...

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