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.
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
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.