Project Geppetto Feedback

[billnuttall]

Hi all,
Here is our (Glass Canvas Productions Limited) feedback from testing Project Geppetto:

We Like:
The natural movement
The subtle varieties between people
The seamless manner in which people avoid each other
Easy to use

We Didn't Like:
The interface. But then again everyone in this office hates the Ribbon.

What We Would Like To See In Future Builds:
The ability to use different system units (VERY important)
The ability to be able to specify custom meshes for the characters
The ability to scale actors and have kids/elderly people
Collision objects that the people would avoid when walking along i.e. street furniture avoidance. (VERY important)
The ability to manipulate the movement paths in the Z axis
Some sort of movement for going up and down stairs


Overall we think Project Geppetto has excellent potential, and when it's been fleshed out a bit more we look forward to incorporating it into our pipeline. It will certainly be far easier and quicker to use than our current max crowd solutions (we tend to use custom built particle simulations).

Hope this helps

[shanegriffith]

thanks for the feedback Bill! your ideas for future builds is inline with our goals.

as a short term workaround here's a quick video to give you some idea on how to modify the pedestrians right now. http://www.screencast.com/t/3mYvMC8IYx4H
this is just a hack for now though, our goal is to glue the evolver tech into the mesh creation process.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the video.
I think Geppetto is a great idea and it brings instant life to my city scenes.

The most important "need" I have right now is also scale. The characters here are a little short, just slightly, for the scale I use.

Though I can scale body parts, and eventually the whole body, I'm wondering how that will effect the stride in the characters walk.

Also, since we can modify each male and female model as a group, It would be nice to add a few more customizable male and female types for variety. Like if we had a few female and male types and I only wanted a few females to have big heads-like the one in the video.

Other than that, the technology here seems to be a natural for automobiles with the stop and go and paths of traffic. Geppetto will make realistic city scenes a snap and I really thank you for that.


P.S. I do a lot of action scenes so customizable actions would really be a plus. Like if the characters were standing around talking and a building exploded and they could all look in the same direction and then maybe run in the opposite direction.

[Anonymous]

You can make your characters slightly bigger by modifying an orchestrator property via maxScript. Select the crowd orchestrator, open the listener, and do this:
o = $
o.realWorldScale (this should show you that the current real world scale is 1.0)
o.realWorldScale = 1.2
By doing this, you've scaled the real world by 1.2. You will notice that the marks in the idle areas and the flows adjust. They move and get slightly larger, and the group circles get larger, to accommodate larger characters. When you re-simulate, your old characters will be replaced by ones 1.2 times the normal scale. You can see also that natural stride and natural motion in general is maintained.

[Anonymous]

I find Geppetto extremely exciting. Of course there are limitation at the moment but the sheer potential for this is fantastic.

Biggest Requests for future:

Z height adjustable paths
Walkers interacting with idlers
object avoidance
custom characters
seated characters
Adjustable scale

Amazing stuff guys! Keep up the good work.

[Anonymous]

...Of course there are limitation at the moment but the sheer potential for this is fantastic...

If I had a nickle for everything in Max that you could say that about and never see it come true...