How to create a bustling crowd simulation in Blender 2.8

[@Rainimator]

Thanks for the tutorial! This will be great for creating huge battle scenes I always wanted to make.

[@TheDuckCow]

Absolutely. I would dig into the boid specific settings around enemies and friends, you really could make good use of that (though careful, you don’t want particles to actually “die” as then they’ll disappear or remain stationary)

[@daugelam]

yeah this kinda important for an army(i think)

[@mdp7193]

0:00 - Intro 1:30 - Adding environment 2:40 - Adding baseline character (set up shapekeys, not in tutorial) 4:52 - Animation, NLA editor 8:00 - Change characters 12:30 - Adjusting animations 16:45 - Setting up simulation system 23:00 - Fixing floating etc of characters (boids, seperate, flock...) 28:30 - Adjusting sim to floor 31:00 - Setting up collisions in environment 35:55 - Disable characters spawning inside collision zones 38:55 - Preparing for render 41:15 - Adding more types of animations in sim system 44:45 - Fixes if characters still intersecting 46:10 - Baking animations (important) 47:50 - Recap

[@mdp7193]

It's hard to find a thorough crowd sim tutorial, thank you for this!

[@TheDuckCow]

@@mdp7193 glad to hear you enjoyed it! Thanks for the timestamps work there - you made me realize KZbin wasn't picking the ones I already wrote in the description because I skipped the 00:00 intro section, now they are showing up on the video as chapters.

[@SVAFnemesis]

I don't know what to say, 5 years ago I learned all of my basic rigging by disecting one of your minecraft rig I found on blendswap, and today I'm at my 3rd year of working as an animator and rigger. Now I stumbled upon your channel once again and is watching your python tutorial. You're like the beacon that is shining ahead of me telling me where to go.

[@TheDuckCow]

Really warms my heart, though sometimes I feel my channel can be a little eclectic, I'm very glad to hear it has been useful across different areas!

[@cg.man_aka_kevin]

Great!!! The most detailed crowd tutorial in KZbin. :)

[@ProVatan2]

4:26 Спасибо, я узнал это впервые... ещё раз тебе спасибо!

[@f07gamingcallofduty93]

I really liked your manuals. I have been wanting to learn this for a long time. Good luck and thank you very much !!!

[@omeletotheegg]

I've thought at first using mesh cache was better, but you really make whats best thank you moack :)

[@TheDuckCow]

Glad it helped! Many ways to do the same thing, but yes - difference performance implications depending on the approach.

[@ByronKindig]

Thank you so much for this. I appreciate the detail.

[@jamesprakashjc]

Really cool video, Blender is not the best for crowd simulation, but you taught me how to make the most of it. Keep up the good work! :)

[@TheDuckCow]

Glad you enjoyed! And absolutely, Blender is a tool and is not the right tool for every job. Programs like Massive for crowd sims are where it’s at, but it never hurts to know how to push your generalist tool like Blender to the max.

[@PetRatPro]

WOO! Can’t wait!

[@JimDHart]

Thanks for this very informative video! Though it is 3 years old, I guess little has been done to improve the BOIDS animation system. =( I would think with all the new stuff the past 1-2 years, this would get a major face lift. It would be nice, for example, to have different NLAs selected based on what each BOID is doing: BOIDS not moving would have a "standing" animation; etc. Maybe there is a way to do this? Anyway, very thought-out tutorial.

[@Hyfivee]

Finally thank you buddy, finally I was able to make my first animation

[@ngocson84]

Superb! Thankyou, sir

[@ThuraTheinTin]

Very good tutorial. Thanks. Great

[@beatsburst4848]

hey bro can u help me my characters are animating downwards???? instead they should be animating towads means 90 degree how to change the rotation of character?????

[@xanecosmo5061]

Great video. Would you make a tutorial on how to use cloth simulations like you do?

[@TheDuckCow]

Glad you liked it. As for cloth sim, I may in the future, but no guarantees. I've done some very quick overviews of how I deal with it in behind the scenes videos (see the "Whirlwind" videos for Sometimes and Destroy You on my channel), otherwise I know there are at least some tutorials out there already (for Minecraft/Blender specifically) and I'm not sure I'll be able to add too much more than those already cover. But let me know if you find one (or two) that fall short of your needs, maybe you can compel me to make my own taking a synthesis from all!

[@xanecosmo5061]

@@TheDuckCow Oh great, I looked at some of the cloth simulation settings of the rigs from your MCPrep and I tried out myself. It somehow, kinda works! You sorta asked me to tell you if I find anything that helped me. But it's you 😅

[@xanecosmo5061]

@@TheDuckCow I scaled my rig all the way up to six times and the cloth glitches are gone, thanks to your example rig. ( My rig was so tiny) lol

[@TheDuckCow]

@@xanecosmo5061 Ah so that's interesting, the cloth sim got more stable when you had higher overall scale of the model? Those things can be funny for sure. Could has have to do with the exterior/interior depth of the collision objects, something I often end up playing with (that and having hidden, simpler collider objects inside the mesh, rather than making e.g. the torso itself the collision object)

[@Amy-qe8br]

youre the best thanks!

[@todornikolov1473]

Interesting. Looking forward!

[@cg.man_aka_kevin]

I want to ask, why is it that when they start at frame 0 or for example from frame 1, it's like they start out in a mess and then in the next frame it starts to get neat? It's like there's a glitch at the beginning then it suddenly the motion is good?

[@TheDuckCow]

It's a good question! It also shows under the hood how things are working. Blender particle systems are calculated on a frame by frame basis. Frame one, a point is in one position. Then the simulation runs, and the only output is the next position. There's no inherent datapoint for "velocity" or "direction", just the final landing point on each frame. The direction fixes itself after one frame because the software adds an extra, post-simulation step to see "ok, where was this point on the previous point" and based on that you get the velocity and direction. Generally speaking, it's always best to have your simulations (including particle sims) start one one frame, but then have your scene actually start rendering some frames later to let things "settle". I typically use a buffer of 10-15 frames just in case I need it, so my animations start rendering from e.g. frame 15 onwards.

[@cg.man_aka_kevin]

@@TheDuckCow Ooo... Great explanation...

[@flowerslovepower8614]

Thank you

[@alan112223]

Thanks mate.

[@cg.man_aka_kevin]

But can you make, how to create plants collision or grass collision? so when the object touches the plant, the plant will interact but be realistic. Or maybe a bonus tutorial for making wind plants effect. Because that's what I need. :) Please... :)))

[@TheDuckCow]

Unfortunately, there are inherent limitations in this approach. There may be some clever things you could do in the material shading of the grass object itself to influence displacement based on proximity to meshes, but I'm not aware of that working for particles itself. Making wind effects though on itself is not hard at all, you can even import the MCprep tall grass to see a prefab of how that is set up using the displacement modifier and a cloud noise texture.

[@cg.man_aka_kevin]

@@TheDuckCow Ok

[@Striker180x]

the crowd after 300 frames disappear even though I set the end frame at 500 why is this happening?

[@TheDuckCow]

Try clearing your cache or changing the seed, and then ensure that the time that each particle lives is more than 500 frames.

[@Striker180x]

Thanks it worked

[@mrbarnett9000]

What happens if the models are not facing the right way? Mine appear to be walking sideways or backwards? :S

[@BlackboxArab]

how get map have 3d block / 3D texture minecraft

[@TheDuckCow]

Perhaps a video like this is useful? Also using MCprep (though a much, much earlier version of it) kzbin.info/www/bejne/hJLbaJyreLmirM0

[@dillibahadurkatuwal6085]

Can u pls enable the setting which allows to show the pressed keys

[@TheDuckCow]

Will see about that for future tutorials that are long in length!

[@CAtlanticer]

thanks for your tutorial TheDuckCow, but i could i hide the plane that has particle except the one i create the crowd?

[@TheDuckCow]

Not sure I follow the quesiton, but there should be a setting for "show emitter", turn this off on your particle object if it's a fake floor (as done in this tutorial), or keep it on if you just used some meshes from your actual world.

[@CAtlanticer]

@@TheDuckCow , ok, i'll try your tip, thanks

[@ahmadalami4346]

A never give up person 😀

[@VortexTheBreadMan]

I saw someone use this feature before on discord I don’t know how they did it with mc perp though

[@TheDuckCow]

Was it maybe HP Binary/Boxscape and The Labs? I shared a rough version of this workflow before which they ran with.

[@MrHahajoe]

Hello, I am using armature driven characters and the emitter system just distribute all the bones everywhere. Any suggestions?

[@TheDuckCow]

The trouble is that, unless you only have one entire character to spawn with no variations, you run into the issue that particle emitters only emit one object at a time. There's a hack (which may not still work, haven't tested) where you end up creating a single mesh for your character, and a single armature. You make all the meshes part of the collection used in the particle spawner, but the armatures are *not* part of that collection. However it may run into dependency issues, again haven't tried recently myself

[@MrHahajoe]

@@TheDuckCow thank you so much for your detailed explanations! I am creating a trade show simulation and definitely I will try out the solution. Also the emitted instance I created always moving out of the boundary. The bigger the boundary is, the less obvious bleeding is happening, is there a way to fully contain the movement within the boundary?

[@TheDuckCow]

@@MrHahajoe Best bet would probably be adding additional (non-rendered) colliders where you need, good luck!

[@MrHahajoe]

@@TheDuckCow you are the best!

[@Lutraa]

Quick question. How do you import the nether using mineways? I try to do it but it just shows a blank screen like nothings there’s in mineways.

[@TheDuckCow]

Hi, if you never entered the Nether in the world, then it wasn't generated yet - thus Mineways has nothing to load. Similarly, it will have only loaded areas of the nether that have been visited, so might be good to know specific coordinates from in game to jump to.

[@middleton3d]

awesome tutorial but I had issues doing this with a mixamo model/walking animation. when I created the simulation with the collection the body parts and clothes separate and act as individual particles. Please help? :)

[@TheDuckCow]

I think I understand, the issue is that it chooses one mesh at a time. The easiest thing would be for you to join all body parts together for a given character. The next best thing you could do is create a collection of just instances of the character (as opposed to the character itself with the armature), and put that into a collection used as an input. Main point is: you want 1 object in the source collection to be an entire character.

[@middleton3d]

@@TheDuckCow Thank you! Will try those out. To clarify, would I join the parts together by parenting them? I'm new to blender. And I'm guessing if I made a collection of instances of the characters, that would help performance in blender?

[@middleton3d]

@@TheDuckCow I tried both methods and the joining the parts seems to work. I couldn't figure out how to get a collection of instances to work though. Also my new issue is that my characters are laying down and not facing the direction they should be walking.

[@TheDuckCow]

@@middleton3d Could be that there isn't a real way to get collection instances to work, tbh I haven't tried it in 2.8+ but I know it sort of workt (though was hacky and had some side effects) in 2.7. For your character issue, try playing around with the different rotation / phase offsets under particle settings. E.g. try even z-up, or as a last resort just rotate your characters in edit mode (a pain if you have armature modifiers though).

[@middleton3d]

@@TheDuckCow Maybe, hopefully they will update that soon because then it would be a much more powerful tool. Thanks again for the tips!

[@ZUnknownFox]

would this technique work with characters that do have armatures and are rigged?

[@TheDuckCow]

Not really, or at least not without some clever hacking. The way you could get that to work is if your armature controlled rig at least had all the meshes combined into one object per rig, and then put al those objects (the objects, not the armatures controlling those objects) into a single collection. Even then it might not work quite as you hope, but that’s a start. If looking for something more advanced, I’d look into the CrowdMaster addon

[@ZUnknownFox]

@@TheDuckCow Ok good to know.

[@ethanreed2672]

I've noticed that the world isn't set apart into different materials how do I fix this? (Sorry for the amount of comments that I've been posting, I'm just here because I need help!)

[@TheDuckCow]

Sorry I missed this one! If you didn't figure it out, you go into edit mode on the mesh, press p, and then separate by materials.

[@alixjanemaestrado4753]

How to separate parts of the maps ? In 2.79 i just click the leavs and automaic highligts and I can edit or hide it. Anyone?

[@TheDuckCow]

The Blender 2.8 Obj importer appears to join all meshes together, as you say. Easiest thing to do is go into edit mode, press p, and then select separate by material - then exit edit mode and you should have each block type as a separate material as before.

[@hd_entertainment0327]

Hi, great video, but I seem to be having some problems with the skin, whenever I try to swap a skin it won't show the eyes, mouth, or nose, it will just show a blank face, why is this happening? plz help

[@TheDuckCow]

Are there eyes and mouths in the texture of the skin itself? A few of the out of the box ones that come with MCprep specifically have the eyes and mouth removed, which are better for rigs that have geometry-based faces.

[@hd_entertainment0327]

@@TheDuckCow ohh so that's the problem, I was switching it to the ones that came with mcprep, but one more thing, and this is about moving actual characters, can you make a video on how to animate individual characters? I feel like there are some things in the character rigs in mcprep that are different from the others I've seen, thanks!

[@TheDuckCow]

@@hd_entertainment0327 These should be pretty standard to most rigs, and in fact many of the rigs come from other packs commonly used like BoxScape studio. That being said, I did create at least this video on the built in steve/generic player rig: kzbin.info/www/bejne/opjVmHhvir2EgM0

[@wilhelm992]

more tuts yes!!!!!!

[@excellenceinanimation960]

Could this be used in a attack on a casels?

[@TheDuckCow]

Matt 476 yes, with some effort. You can’t make intricate actions or logic (like everyone is either in a running phase, or in a “killed” state etc). But I definitely know people who have made it work, at least for the majority of shots. Then you fill in custom animation for the foreground where relevant.

[@excellenceinanimation960]

TheDuckCow would you be able to work on a project. If so can you contact me on discord? My ign is Matt476# 1269.

[@suzeal]

cool

[@riccardofissore7996]

What if I'd like the characters to fall off a plane?

[@ZUnknownFox]

then don't add collisions or make the collision plane smaller.

[@elestirenbukalemun6584]

who are you duckcow ad boxscape studios?

[@TheDuckCow]

I (Patrick aka TheDuckCow) am just some rando person who makes animations and blender addons. Boxscape is a completely different but cool group of animators and asset creators for Minecraft, who have contributed some resources for me to use in releasing MCprep.

[@elestirenbukalemun6584]

@@TheDuckCow I want to make rigs maybe ı can make rigs for you and maybe to boxscape studio

[@YuvrajxLodhi]

How to add mobile in it.

[@happyjay8141]

It's not for Mobile it's for PC only

[@YuvrajxLodhi]

@@happyjay8141 I mean mobile prop for player in animation