Maya - Custom crowd system

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This node is a basic crowd system for taking ‘agents’ from point A to point B while dodging other agents and mesh obstacles (walls, non-walkable areas, etc.)

• A* algorithm
• Written in C++ for better performance

Below a demonstration on the crowd system.

Functionality

Every agent, based on its priority, will wait if another agent is obstructing its path and continue when it’s clear.

For each agent it will calculate per frame:

• Position
• Aim direction ( For smooth turns )
• Distance ( Useful for auto walk on characters. )

An agent in action!

You can see the autowalk and aim direction being fed from the crowd system node.

Changing the end point of an agent, the node calculates and outputs the new path.

To conclude, this crowd system is able to:

• Use as many agents as you want to procedurally get from point A to point B.
• Mark geometry as obstacles for agents.
• Attribute to get the direction of the path.
• Progress float attribute to implement “auto-walk” on rigs.
• Change the goal point on the go.
• Store the procedural path on cached playback.

Future plans:

• The aim direction is calculated by inspecting the next position on the path, the path itself could be smoother for a more natural looking walking
• There is ton of theory to study from for optimization and features.
• Multithreading