Pixar Crowds Chat #1

These are my notes from a chat I had with JD Northrup from Pixar about usability issues in Massive...

There are a few tools that Massive provides for directing crowd motion:

• paint input values for fuzzy logic computations (static over time)
• flow fields
• sound beacons (attraction to/repulsion from a location in 3 space)

M.O. = get most of the agents working then add in special cases for the individuals who aren't cooperating (or just kill them off)

Massive uses the notion of behavior groups (don't quite remember the specific definition of this use of 'group')

Massive does not allow keyframe/direct authoring of motion for hero characters (i.e. especially important for when they are carrying a sound beacon)

There is no notion of state or stored memory for agents in Massive.  The fuzzy logic model is purely functional.  An FSM would be nice to have.

JD claimed that Massive is pretty much limited to characters on a ground plane.

Subframe calculations do not exist or cannot be accessed.