Have Populate characters walk on graded surface?

[Scott Dombrowski]

For exterior traffic animations, I need to fill the sidewalks with people. Because the real world is rarely perfectly flat, I've been having problems using the Populate tool. Adding ramps to flows is cumbersome and always leaves a flat "landing" at either end which results in characters walking on air or wading through concrete. The ramps also do not handle people stepping off of curbs, or sidewalks with slight variations in transverse grade.

 

The Civil View Traffic Surface Tracking function is the exact tool I need for this, but of course it only works with Civil View vehicles.

 

I've gotten as far as using "Bake Selected" to turn the characters into bones and a skin, which I'm pretty sure is the first step to a solution, but I'm not sure how to have the bone system follow a surface. This is for medium to wide shots with a hundred characters, so it's ok if the feet aren't exactly on the surface, but I need to get it closer than I can now.

 

Any ideas?

[Francisco Penaloza]

Populate it is pretty limited, it does great stuff, but there is no way to fine tune any of the animations.

Because of that I always try to avoid those conflict areas. for me, they walk in the side walk, or they walk on the street, not cross in between, the system get even weird animation on stairs transitions.

 

The Bones system it is not designed to follow surfaces either, you need to toy around with other tool to make something similar. For instance, link your bone system to a dummy and let the dummy to follow a plane terrain, that need extra know how regarding max system that sadly I don't have

but you could make the dummy follow a path easily, the Spline can be aligned with your terrain, but that won't interact with the animation of your character, bending knees and fixing the steps to adjust to the different terrain. They'll make them look like Puppets being drag up and down

In short, it is a lot of manual labor.

[Nicolai Bongard]

As Francisco said, it is a lot of work to make those custom animations. However if you animate a walkcycle you can set it to repeat, and then link the diamond of the biped to a dummy and the dummy to a spline. If you do require semi accurate footsteps i think the CAT rig has some possibilities to set footsteps, but i am not sure that would be a good way to go.

[andresfernandezcruz]

You can find a tool to place characters over a surface and along a spline path, but without correcting animation, here: P3D_PlacePeople

[andresfernandezcruz]

Take a look at this plugin: P3D_PlacePeople

It will help to glue characters to surface and follow a path, but won't correct their animations.