Crowd Manager
The CrowdManager coordinates and references data and parameters needed by several steps of the crowd simulation. It is required by almost all nodes of the plugin. Thus, the Crowd Manager is created automatically when required. It cannot be deleted and there must only be one instance of it in a scene.
The attributes of the Crowd Manager are not keyable. Once the Crowd Manager has been initialized, if attribute values are changed, they will not be taken into account until the next reinitialization of the node (start frame).
Creation
The Crowd Manager is created automatically when required.
Configuration
The Crowd Manager defines the following attributes:
Attributes of the Crowd Manager node
General Attributes
| Start Frame | Frame from which the Animation Attributes will be initialized (must be equal or lower than the start frames of the CrowdFields in the scene) or reinitialized each time the current time reaches the start frame |
| Random Generator Seed | value used to initialize the Golaem internal random generator. Two simulations launched with the same parameters and the same seed will produce the exact same results. Changing this value has an influence on the entities placement (see the population tool), the types repartition (see the population tool), some parameters of the Crowd Field and some parameters of the Behaviors and Operators |
| Threads Count | The number of thread used by Golaem Engine. |
| Crowd Unit | The crowd unit used in the simulation (see here). |
Terrain Attributes
| In Terrain Mesh | Terrain locator attached to the Crowd Manager. The Terrain will be used by the Entities to compute their path to a target, to know where the obstacles are and to avoid the other entities. Select the Terrain with the combo box. |
Physics Attributes
| Physics Locator | The physics locator used in the simulation |
Simulation Attributes
| In Entity Types | Entity Types registered and available in the scene. Entity Types are automatically registered in the Crowd Manager, but it is possible to remove/add them manually (see here) |
| In Group Entity Types | Group Entity Types registered and available in the scene. Group Entity Types are automatically registered in the CrowdManager, but it is possible to remove/add them manually (see here) |
| Crowd Entity Id Start / Crowd Entity Id Stop | Lower and upper bound of the interval (included) of the Entities that will be animated (-1 for no interval). These parameters are also taken into account by the Simulation Tool. Simulating only a part of Entities enable to do out-of-core simulation when there are numerous characters in the scene and the host computer does not have enough memory |
| Group Entities | Group of Entities created in the scene, shown as [GroupId]-[GroupEntityTypeId]. |
Export Attributes
These attributes refer to the Asset Manager and the Simulation Tool. They are automatically set by these tools and should not be modified manually.
Export attributes and management attributes of the Crowd Manager node
Rendering Attributes
Rendering attributes
| Kill List | A list of EntityId (select particle and watch ppAttributes to get it) to be ignored at render times. This enable to hide an unwanted characters at render. Input format example: "1,2" , "10-12", "1-3,55" |
Unlock Crowd Manager Node
| Unlock Crowd Manager Node | A Golaem Crowd scene should have one and only one Crowd Manager. To ensure it is not deleted by inadvertance, this node is locked. However sometimes when importing crowd scenes into another, a scene can contains several Crowd Manager nodes. In such a case ones should use the "Unlock Crowd Manager Node" button to unlock unnecessary nodes before deleting them (or unlock/delete them using MEL or Python) |