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By storiedknowledgechannel - 2 Years Ago
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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.
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By Kelleytoons - 2 Years Ago
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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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By storiedknowledgechannel - 2 Years Ago
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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.
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By Kelleytoons - 2 Years Ago
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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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By storiedknowledgechannel - 2 Years Ago
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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!
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By Kelleytoons - 2 Years Ago
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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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By storiedknowledgechannel - 2 Years Ago
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Yes, that worked! They all move around fine like they should.
How do I trouble shoot what's wrong with my nav mesh?
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By Kelleytoons - 2 Years Ago
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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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By storiedknowledgechannel - 2 Years Ago
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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.
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By Kelleytoons - 2 Years Ago
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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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By jwyman4 - 2 Years Ago
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yeah I'm having the smae issue as well on a larger Nav Mesh. Everything is set up correctly and when the MD play button is executed everyone just stands there. As you've mentioned earlier there is prob a bug in the crowd sim/nav mesh that hasn't been ironed out. Its extremely frustrating once you get setup and go to run the sim and nothing happens... Generating a volume box just doesn't cut it for what I want to do. I as well though about reaching out to Rampa but i'm not sure he has the full knowlegde of crowd sim workings. Maybe Kai knows more about crowd sim does and don'ts. Is he part of this board by chance?
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By Kelleytoons - 2 Years Ago
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I don't think I've ever seen Kai post here - if he has it's only to announce a tutorial he's done.
I think if I were you I'd file a trouble ticket just to see what they say. They can't be unaware of this issue, but at least it might get them moving on it. I'm going to see if I can play around with various meshes to duplicate this and file my own report.
I will keep repeating this - they either had no beta, or a very incompetent one. The IDEA of crowd simulation in iClone is great, but the execution leaves a LOT to be desired. It looks great IF you have a VERY controlled condition to use it, but so far I've found almost zero use for it under any normal kinds of circumstances (let's face it - if you have a perfectly flat mesh and all you need are folks walking you can do this yourself without any sort of help. It's only on those uneven meshes, or where you have a need for folks to do more than just the few MD walks available that you need assistance with, and Crowd Sim doesn't do that. Not even close).
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By Peter (RL) - 2 Years Ago
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Please remember that if you believe there is a bug with Crowd sim, please report it in the Feedback Tracker and supply your project for testing (this is very important). The dev team will then investigate the issue and give you a status update there.
However, do be sure the issue is not just user inexperience by following the specific feature tutorials on the page below. Features like Nav Mesh are covered in some detail so do check these out if you haven't already.
https://courses.reallusion.com/home/iclone/crowd-sim
And of course if your issue is urgent and causing you loss of work, then please feel free to contact Support using the link below. They will try to get the problem resolved for you as soon as possible.
https://www.reallusion.com/CustomerSupport/UserEx/QForm.html
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By Kelleytoons - 2 Years Ago
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It's good advice, Peter, but I will add one thing - I've been following the tutorials precisely but there is an awful lot they either leave out (and I won't attribute the purpose so let's be generous and just say it's an error of omission and not because they know it doesn't work) or just don't go into.
EVERY single example I've seen in the tutorials and in Kai's online work uses very vanilla base meshes. There isn't one that is anything other than perfectly flat (now, there are some with stairs, but they don't use a navmesh but use paths). I'm not saying it doesn't work with a mesh other than perfectly flat, only that it's odd there isn't even one example posted and in the ones I've tried it just doesn't work.
But, yes, I fully intend on submitting some issues through the tracker when I get the time and I hope the OP does the same. At the very least I'd like to be told what it is I'm doing wrong (because it has to be something NOT in the tutorials).
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By storiedknowledgechannel - 2 Years Ago
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I submitted a ticket just now. Hopefully I left enough info so there won’t need to be too much back and forth. I uploaded my project file and told them where I got the Unreal mesh from, which came from a free environment on the market place, in case they need to reproduce the whole thing.
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By storiedknowledgechannel - 2 Years Ago
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Here's the solution. It wasn't the flatness of the mesh but the offset from the origin.
Navmesh On Offset Mesh - YouTube
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By Kelleytoons - 2 Years Ago
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Can’t look right now but I assume the solution is to reset the mesh origin then (I’ll look later)
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By Rampa - 2 Years Ago
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Another solution is to just pick the mesh itself as your crowd object instead of using the navmesh, in severe offset cases like this. I think you and KT both mentioned that already as well. :)
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By storiedknowledgechannel - 2 Years Ago
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Yep, but in this case it didn't work for me because I couldn't find a way to prevent them from walking through the fountain - unless you can somehow create a barrier without a nav mesh.
I just had the idea though to create a large block or cylinder that the characters won't walk over? I might try that just to see if it works. Either way, I've already transferred the crowd to Unreal so it doesn't matter.
Thanks again!
EDIT: Create a large object doesn't work, they just walk through it.
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By Kelleytoons - 2 Years Ago
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You actually can do what you want by creating a mesh and then setting it's properties so it can't be walked through (this is a setting in the mesh itself).
In any case, you've helped me quite a bit with this and I'm sure others will also benefit.
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By storiedknowledgechannel - 2 Years Ago
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Which setting is that? I see an "impassable" in the nav mesh option when I add, say, a cylinder, but I just tried it and it doesn't work if you just pick the ground object to spawn people on without generating a nav mesh.
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