I'm playing with the crowd sim for the first time and I have actor core crowd characters generated on a nav mesh. I've assigned .iMD motions to them and I have the idle/move ratio get all the way to move, but all they do is stand there doing idling motions. I also have everyone selected to "auto in zone." The motion are all stroll or walk .imd’s.

And you have set it to USE the MD motions, right?  (The default is not).

And then you use the MD player to actually have them move?

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Here's my setup. When I press start they just do idle motions. That's all I can tell Kai is doing in the webinar but his people move around. 

Yeah I'd need to see a LOT more to see what your problems are (see how your scatter settings are, where you have your MDs placed, how your characters are put with what keywords to do what, etc).

Perhaps you should make a video of what you are trying to do and I'm sure someone here (if not myself, then for sure Mr. G or Rampa) will help.

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Here's my scatter setting with actors and motions assigned, along with placement before they have been deployed. Let me know if there any other screenshots you want to see. I appreciate your time!

Yeah, I'm just not seeing the whole picture without a video showing your steps.

Here's what I would do if I were you - create a surface (just a floor using the prop floor), make a navmesh, populate it with the same folks you are using and the same movements, and see what happens.  That should work just fine.  Then you can start troubleshooting what is going wrong (my gut tells me it's something to do with your navmesh/mesh but you first got to get the workflow right on something simple).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Yes, that worked! They all move around fine like they should.

How do I trouble shoot what's wrong with my nav mesh?

My guess (and remember, I'm the blind leading the blind) is there is something with your basic underlying mesh that's an issue.  I say that because I had the same problem until I backed off my mesh and used a perfectly flat one.

What I speculate (again - blind ignorance here) is that generating a navmesh over uneven surfaces is sketchy at best (of course, because RL gives us so very LITTLE information about how any of this works we are all just guessing).  Is your mesh perfectly flat?  If it ain't, then that's your problem.  Now - what I would try in that case is to generate a volume (or whatever the heck they call it) because I note that even Kai uses the volume approach on a mesh that IS perfectly flat, at least in one of his tutorials.  He doesn't really elaborate on why, but (again, guessing) I think it's because generating a navmesh on an object just is wonky.

So try that - use the volume thingee approach (you kind of make a cube and then sort of expand/lower it over your mesh and generate the navmesh from there).  That ought to work (and we really need to hammer on RL for giving us better docs and/or explanations about all of this.  My guess (sigh - again) is that even THEY know it's wonky and don't want to make too big a deal out of it.  Like saying "Hey, you really shouldn't be using navmesh on an object, but what the heck, we put it in there so we won't tell you not to do it.  It works sometimes, anyway").

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Creating a volume doesn't work either. Same thing, they just idle there. The only way I could get it to work is to place a floor over the whole area and have the crowd spawned on the floor. This method doesn't generate a navmesh. However, as far as I can tell this leaves me unable to create an avoidance volume so they walk through the fountain area which won't work. 

The only other thing I can think of is to create multiple floors around the fountain and have isolated groups on each of those, but they'll be confined to limited areas in that case. I doubt anyone would notice if they watched, it's just unfortunate to have to go through the extra work and the feature doesn't work as it's supposed to. 

If you want to share your mesh (at least the ground part of it) I'd be glad to take a crack at it.  I'm not saying I'd be any better, but mostly because if I can't get it to work I'd file a troubleshooting report with RL (which of course you can do as well).

I wish Rampa would weigh in on this - he does get paid (occasionally) for being RL support, and he would have a MUCH better idea.  But my sinking feeling is this is just a terrible bug with the whole navmesh system (there are MANY things I've found about it that don't work properly - don't get me started on paths, sigh - and all of this just tells me they either had zero beta testers or at least really piss poor ones (and I do know MANY who were not involved or even considered to be asked).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley