I’m working on a game that includes a stadium with a crowd made up of a varied set of robots (likely a series of meshes with parts of varying/randomized color), and I would greatly appreciate any suggestions as to how this can be done.
I have looked around, and it seems like I would need to use a set of instanced static meshes to create the crowd without requiring too many resources. I have looked into the “Vertex Animation Tool” (as seen here), as well as the “Static Mesh Morph Targets” page (here). Unfortunately, both of those methods use a Maxscript, and I’m using Blender, so it doesn’t really help.
This page (here) seems to imply that at least some kind of VAT setup can be done from Blender (the note near the top of the page), but gives no real suggestion as to how such a thing could be done, especially given that the Maxscript still seems necessary.
Are there any resources available so I can emulate the results of those scripts from Blender, or does anyone else have any other suggestions as to how I could create an animated stadium crowd?
I appreciate any suggestions (assuming they don’t point me to the links I just said I can’t use, because that wouldn’t be very helpful).
To me, vertex animation seems like a best approach. Maybe you can simplify desired animation to the point where simply painting vertex colors for control would be enough?
I don’t know a ton about vertex colors in general (or what kind of support Blender has for them), but I assume that the images on this page (here) are the collection of vertex colors for each vertex at each frame? (vertices being the x-axis and frames being the y-axis)
I assume that the colors correspond to different XYZ values, but I’m not entirely sure in what way they do.
I guess I would need some help in figuring out how to use Vertex Colors as well as how they may be manipulated (or at least determined) in Blender. Are there any easily accessible resources where I could learn more?
I actually just finished writing a version of the Vertex Animation script for blender! Right now it only has the animated mesh functionality. Basically you select all the animated meshes you want in the effect and push a button and it spits out a single mesh and two textures to export. Your total vertex count can’t be higher than 8192 and it eats your 2nd UV channel, but any other UVs will be added to the export mesh. For a crowd you might do like a couple different groups of people. Then you can also offset their animation in the material and particle system. If you’re interested I’m going to make a post soon. I just don’t know the best way to distribute it. I don’t have a GitHub or anything. Hopefully it will have support for key framed meshes soon. Also I plan on making a full suite of tools with something like Pivot Painter too if possible.
Yes, I would be very interested in seeing that. Please leave a link in this topic when you have your post up. I’m not entirely sure what the best way to distribute it would be either, although Github is free to create an account for. You may be able to just post it on the forums (or a link to it from a text dumping site or something). You may need to ask around for that part.
This is actually really awesome to hear. Looking forward to seeing it. Thanks!