I have successfully created the sample projects ai crowd in my own project (arc viz) but it takes my fps from a solid 40fps to less than 10fps. Im using an rtx 3090.
Is it at all possible now that i have the crowd set up and working to bake the simulation? The sample project has crazy amounts of ai crowds and it runs fine. I have 100 spawned. There must be a further step to get the performance smooth now… any help would be greatly appreciated!
after much research i dont believe baking is possible. However I have identified the issue using the profiler. My crowd character is partented to the character class and is using the character movement component. This kills the performance. Is there another method I could use to move a character with a walking animation around using the mass ai? Some thing that isnt performance heavy… I’m redownloading the city sample for 5.1 to see what they are doing but if anyone knows the answer please let me know
Hi Ruigol,
I am on the same path as you, I have a mass ai crowd as well. After I spawn like 10 of them my fps goes from 60 to barley 30. From what I have found in the City sample project is they switch from Skeleton meshes to animated Static meshes.
They used the Anim To Texture plugin to convert them. As far as I can tell they use Niagara to swap them out. If you look in the crowd character blueprint there is a component called Doppelganger which I believe is handling the switch, but I am not 100% sure on that yet.
If you go to the Mass crowd level and run simulation, change the viewing to see LOD color, you will see a bunch of grey characters, those are the static meshes.
This guy has a great tutorial on how to create animated Static meshes.
It works fine on unmodified City Crowd characters, but I have not been successful on stock Metahuman characters yet.
Which is the a shame, I spent a lot of time changing outfits to a more casual look for my crowd and I am stuck at baking out my Static meshes. It won’t populate the rotation Texture. However, that is for a separate thread.
Hope that helps!
Same with you
Yeah I found my way to this too, currently trying to merge the crowd characters into single skeletal meshes - i found a blueprint widget that converts them to static mesh and i use the anim to texture plugin to make the material, im also trying too find a Niagara system to have them walk around a spline path with collision avoidance, i find it hard to believe that no one has done this yet other than the atom plugin but its hella expensive and i just need this simple performance friendly crowd tool. I even tried anima xyz but it too had trouble performance wise with 200 animations playing. Seems like such a good idea to use Niagara maybe if i dig into the matrix sample a bit more i can figure it out
I got the VAT Tool working with stock metahumans, What I had to do with some of my metahuman clothing was take it into Blender and disconnect the rig and apply it to one of the city sample rigs and copy over the weights. In the end it all worked out.
This would probably help with merging to one rig as well.
Swapping rigs in blender
I left my components as sperate because I didn’t want to deviate too much from the City Sample Crowd Blueprint. I ended up not using Niagara, I just stuck with all animated Static meshes. It was compromise that I was willing to make for my project.