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Question by treetoplake · Jun 28, 2010 at 02:33 PM · aicharacters

Re: Smartest way to populate a large scene with many moving characters?

We are making a serious game level. The end result is an online business-to-business presentation of a proposed leisure facility. In reality it should have about 1000 characters in it engaging in various activities related to the facility. I have thought of 2 ways of approach to populate the scene with some activity.

A) Puppets and some animated characters. Use 750 or so still characters in seated/standing positions, groups etc. 250 animated (that is still a lot) in-between to make it look busy. Local looping animations per zone. Some ambient general animations (standing looking around, walking around)

B) AI option Is it an option to use AI for this kind of project? Where characters are allowed to animated within a zone with a limited number of animation options.

What would you advise?

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Answer by Ricardo · Jun 28, 2010 at 03:24 PM

You should look into Behavior Trees for controlling the actors, which you can implement in Unity using AngryAnt's Behave. You could use a Finite State Machine to control their changes between states, as it doesn't seem that you're going for too complex a behavior.

For steering I'd use UnitySteer, but depending on your timeline you may want to give it a couple weeks, as it's currently being overhauled (development branch) - particularly the neighbor avoidance code.

Bear in mind that getting a crowd of 250 actors to behave realistically in such a scene will be non-trivial. The more you can constrain them (for instance, not having them walk around) the better.

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avatar image treetoplake · Jun 29, 2010 at 08:26 AM 0
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Ok sounds interesting .. and thanks! The ambient movement is going to be covered this but certainly I gotta get my research hat on. $$anonymous$$ost of the actors doing stuff (walking) will be moving in-between the ambient characters (head turning, morphing positions etc) Would you say it is quickly learnable by a 3d expert but Unity newbie? or should we try to find a programmer to help us out?

avatar image Ricardo · Jun 29, 2010 at 08:44 AM 0
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I'm still unclear on if they're going to be moving around the environment, but it seems they are. If it's for a client, get a programmer. It's not about Unity itself, but about the experience you have creating agents and having them interact with each other (avoidance is a type of interaction :-)). The concepts themselves are not complex to learn, but getting the behavior right is. You can probably get a few agents around easy enough, but getting a ton of them to behave in a coherent manner will take work.

avatar image treetoplake · Jun 29, 2010 at 06:52 PM 0
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hi ricardo we have worked out that about 750 or more will be stationary in poses at tables, bar, groups etc but about 100 will be animated somehow in ambient simple morphs or similar and say 150 will be engaged in some animation or activity (skiing, snowmobiling, walking etc) we are looking at AI but also the simple way to loop some animations .. however i would love to get some AI going if only some characters walking around in some 'zone' im looking for someone local to us who has Unity3d experience and have found a couple of freelancers .. checking them out this week trying to get them in

avatar image Ricardo · Jun 29, 2010 at 08:05 PM 0
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Good luck with the project! (I was just going to say "good luck", but Answers didn't think it was large enough a comment. So there.)

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