Hi all,
I need to find a good solution for our artists to generate large stadium crowds (football, baseball stadiums). Each billboard needs to rotate to follow the player, so they each need their own pivot point, but they also need to be exported as 1 mesh for performance reasons.
I was able to export large crowds from 3ds max using the Pivot Painter tools to store each billboard’s pivot point in its vertex colors/alpha, but doing that for 10 different stadiums with 50,000+ billboards each won’t be quick. I can’t help but think there’s got to be a better way to do that.
I have had some success using the Procedural Foliage tools, but with some lighting issues, and I can’t get it working with the CrowdImposter material function.
I am looking for suggestions or ideas for creating large stadium crowds efficiently, so any help would be really appreciated!
I don’t work with 3ds Max, so I can’t tell if it’s possible, but in most 3D Applications you can access some kind of a command line and execute python commands/scripts. You just need to look the name of the function up and write a foreach loop.
EDIT: and what do you mean by “performance-reasons”. Just export each Mesh separately and import them into the engine (use instanced static meshes).
yeah we can use MAXScript to automate almost anything in 3DS Max, and I’m pretty comfortable with it having written many MAX tools over the years, so we might have to go that route if we end-up using MAX to create our crowds.
I have tried using the Instanced Static Meshes yet, that was gonna be my next “test”, I am thinking about creating a crowd blueprint that lets us generate the crowd in the editor instead, using instanced meshes.
