2. Mud Men Troop

Initial brief

To begin with I did not even know about the Mud Men idea. I wanted to have a behavioural system for people to fight each other, and see what I could build into it, such as ducks and rolls for example. I had some idea of a mass crowd control system.

I decided to research some Siggraph1 papers to get some help and thereafter I would use my master class project geometry for the visual side of the simulation. Finally I would use Mel to script the behaviours of the characters.

The outcome was to be a short animated sequence depicting a group of characters coming across each other and enacting a dance to the death, with a collection of complexities woven in, hopefully!

How Was I to Achieve This?

At first it seemed like a relatively easy thing to do. However, at that point I did not have an extensive knowledge of programming and had ignorantly assumed it couldn’t be that hard!

So I went about thinking of ways in which to have my characters move around.
I remembered from last year that Adam Vanner had shown us a simple behavioural system Behaviour.mel(Adam Vanner 2001).

I hunted through my old drive directories and the Internet, scouring every possible source
for code that I could build into my script.

I came across many variations for control over crowds. Gnats.mel(John L. Kundert-Gibbs 1999) and Flock.mel(John L. Kundert-Gibbs 1999) They used particles, I discovered. In actual fact I didn’t find another script that used geometry apart from Behaviour.mel(Adam Vanner 2001).

Then followed much experimentation. I spent time trying to get the geometric method to work, then swapped to particles because it seemed more flexible, and then moved back again to geometry. At last I resolved the problem and my journey towards a satisfactory solution is the subject of this report.

Final Brief

After it became apparent that I was not going to be able to do the behavioural system that I wanted, it had to be acknowledged that I would need to try to accomplish something slightly less complex.

Around this time my brother (Chris Greybe), who is currently studying 2D/3D Animation at Newport University (South Wales), asked for my help with one of his projects. This involved a large collection of people (the Mud Men described in the introduction) moving in towards the camera and past it.

Luckily for him I was myself struggling with a similar conundrum, and so decided to adapt my brief to fulfil his criteria. That is how I came upon the concept of the Mud Men troop.