Upper bound on Crowd Size and Future of Geppetto

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I'd like to ask the Autodesk folks two questions:

1) ever pushed the upper limits - what is the biggest crowd that could be simulated on a high end machine?

2) what is the future of Geppetto beyond next summer? I am building a project pipeline that hopefully will work something like this:
client building model -> 3ds design -> gepetto crowd -> swift3d -> silverlight interactive video
With gepetto right in the middle.

any help or pointers would be deeply appreciated

Prof strelzoff

[Anonymous]

"Future
We can't comment directly on our plans for this research, but we’d like to see this technology become more flexible so that it can be used in more arbitrary ways, whether for analysis or entertainment purposes. Project Geppetto is just a stepping stone to much more interesting applications of this technology. The technology preview executable expires at the end of the technology preview based on a time-bomb date that has been set for July 1, 2012."

From the Project Labs page...
http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/geppetto/

[Anonymous]

Also;

http://labs.autodesk.com/about/

[Anonymous]

I've had a few hundred in an empty scene before. Any simulation beyond 300 frames and the meshes started to interfere and become locked onto each other.

Basically, they'd "avoid" each other up to a point, but once past 300 or so frames, one mesh would freeze, and then any others that walked into its path would freeze onto the original frozen mesh. At the end of 1800 frames, I ended up with a huge mass of people meshes all bound up in the middle of an intersection, but the people on the outer edges of the paths were unaffected, and continued to walk like normal.

[Anonymous]

I wonder if you could get a couple hundred and a full architectural scene at this point. This is what I'll ultimately want (and obviously I'm sure the point of the system).