Thoughts on interfaces for directing

Aside from the interactive evolutionary aspects of our system we need to think about interfaces for directing things like target positions, flow fields, and post simulation fixes.

Target positions can be any number of things:

• randomly distributed points within a user-defined shape (keyframed interpolated shape controller?)
• particular target points in space with a radius of influence (keyframed sphere controller?)
• a particular individual in the crowd or a keyframed individual not governed by behavior rules (spline controller?)

Flow fields are difficult to provide an intuitive interface for, especially if they are time varying.  Any ideas here?

Post simulation fixes are a must with any usable crowd system.  Perhaps this is better done in a typical animation environment (i.e. Maya).  Maybe we can just provide space-time data output that can be imported easily into Maya or something else for direct animation fixes.

Perhaps if we were actually creating a crowd system to compete with Massive, a layered approach would be nice.  (much like layers in Photoshop)  The particle motion would form the bottom layer.  Fuzzy-logic and motion clip blending would take place at the middle layer.  And post-sim fixes could be at the top layer.