Creating a Realistic Insect Crowd Simulation in Maya
Throughout these lessons, we'll develop an easy to control crowd simulation system with geometry instanced to Maya's nParticles. Software required: Maya 2014, NUKE.
What you'll learn
Throughout these lessons, we'll develop an easy to control crowd simulation system with geometry instanced to Maya's nParticles. Maya's robust particle instancing system, along with the ability to precisely control particle movement along a surface, makes it easy to create an army of insects crawling along a surface. By emitting into secondary nParticle objects we'll create the illusion of insects falling, or taking off from, that surface. Creation and runtime expressions, along with noise and ramp nodes, will be used to build an end user friendly control system that will govern all aspects of particle behavior including birth, death, emission rate, and movement. Software required: Maya 2014, NUKE.
Table of contents
- Moving Nparticles Across a Goal Surface 11m
- Restricting the Emission Area with a Ramp 11m
- Using a Noise Node to Simulate Random Movement 7m
- Creating a Control Object for the Crowd System 10m
- Adding an Emission Rate and Global Speed Control 9m
- Building Basic Geometry Instancing for Nparticles 7m
- Creating Targets for Instancing 6m
- Adding Instanced Geometry to the Nparticle System 12m
- Controlling Forward Alignment 7m
- Aligning Instances with the Goal Surface's Normal 10m
- Emitting into a Secondary Nparticle Object 8m
- Adding an Instancer Node to the Second Nparticle Object 7m
- Transitioning the Aim World up Vector to Match World Space 11m
- Controlling Which Nparticle Object to Emit Into 12m
- Using a Ramp to Drive the Conditions of Particle Emission 7m
- Controlling the Birth and Flight Zone Ramps 10m
- Adding Controlled Randomness to Our Particle Emission 11m
- Transferring the Crowd System to a New Surface 10m
- Finishing the Crowd Transfer Tool 13m
- Applying the Crowd System in a Shot 11m
- Preventing Collisions and Caching the Simulation 16m
- Rendering the Shot 12m
- Compositing the Shot 9m
