Attached Link: Snooker1.AVI (DivX 5 codec required)

I tried Python scripting a few days ago and when I did I couldn't stop trying it some more. I came up with an ideal gas simulation, with gravity applied to the particles. Then I added friction and the wall and bag coordinates to the script. It works great for a bunch of ball props bouncing off each other.

There's no real collision detection involved, that's why this only works for balls. And currently the balls must have the same mass (and thus be the same size) because the script doesn't yet deal with masses. The balls don't also roll yet, they just slide.

I made the animations by setting two keyframes for the white ball(s) and then running the script, that's it. The scene's current frame and the previous frame are used to calculate the initial movement for the particles.

So, would anyone like to have this (for free) if I made a GUI for it?

Attached Link: Snooker2.AVI (DivX 5 codec required)

Here's another video clip. Seems like the groundlevel is set a little too high...

Of course we'll want it :o) It looks great!

Oh yes, Poser has come a loooonnnggg way! Marque

I'm all excited about the possibilities I have with Python and I've already got too many new ideas. I just wish Poser could offer more codes and methods for the scripts, like a simple boolean variable to indicate collisions. I already made my own "real" collision detection script which calculates a vertice's distance from a triangle (extracted from a polygon) but that's too slow even for low-res objects. Anyway, I'll upload the script soon.

Very cool, me likes muchly :) Can't wait to try this, I thought that, from the subject line, that you got solids out of the poser cloth room :)

This is cool :) Looking forward to seeing more scripts from you!

Attached Link: Follow1.AVI (2.09 MB)

Stew, you bet you're goin' to see some more scripts, now that I've started. I just made this one which sets a character to follow another character or prop. This is not the perfect walking animation for the mannequin but it works as an example. No walk path or walk designer was used. I don't know if this is good for anything (not to mention the snooker dynamics script) but I enjoy making these.

Still adjusting the dynamics script a little...

Wow that Follow thing looks impressive for sure! So you say the character folows anything that moves without the need of Walkdesigner? (trying to figure out HOW it works) How does that work on 4-legged characters? I'm seeing things like a dog on a leash here.... oh wow. Also was this rendered in Poser? And if so, how did you make that cool fade-to-black on the ground? Transmap?

I want. I am like TrekkieGirl, stamping foot and demanding, I WANT IT. Seriously, it sounds very good.

Hehehe starts stomping again I WANT! I WANT!

Hey, you got explosions, but I got no feedback, and I am still waiting for my NVEIATWAS*. (*Naked Vicky Exploding In A Temple With A Sword) Lol.

Okay, here's how the walking script works: it applies a walking animation to a figure, and repeats it to fill the frame range. Then it goes through every frame again, replaces the Hip actor's XTran, ZTran and YRot values according to the target's direction. Just basic vector mathematics. So 4-legged characters should work equally well, if you have a walking animation for them. And yes, the animation was rendered in Poser 5. The fade effect is simple: just check DepthCue_On for the Atmosphere material, set DepthCue_Color to black, background color to black as well, and DepthCue_StartDist to 450 and EndDist to 670.

I am very interested. I am tired of fighting with the walk designer and deskate scripts and feet going through the floor and stuff, so anything that will help is welcome. Um, I am assuming these are freebies?

So now combine the two scripts, and you have a neat little crowd simulation :-)

Attached Link: Follow2.AVI (374 KB)

These will of course be freebies. The walking script still needs some work but I didn't have any feet going through the floor. You mean figures acting as snooker balls, Stewer? LOL Here's a clip showing figures following other figures. I'll still have to get the feet working. Now they slide a little when turning, I hope I can get that fixed.

Hmm... a "flocking" script, esp. if it could be configured to work with "any" characters (bipedal or... otherwise) would be interesting. I wonder if we could get a flock of DAZ gallimimus models flocking across an uneven (hilled) terrain...? (IIRC there's already a super "keep the figure on a ground" type pythonm script, but it might need some work to take account of extra feet and tails?). Typically flocking scripts have sets of simple rules, like "a character should get no nearer another character than X, and no nearer an obstacle than Y" and so on and so forth. Now there's a challenge for ya! Cheers, Cliff

Have now actually watched the animations (it helps, I guess). Wow. Ideas that occur to me having watched them. 1. Wow. That might seem like repeating myself, but some things are worth repeating. 2. How about being able to select which frame of the source walk animation is used to "start" a given character? That should make it easier to avoid any "marching band" syndrome. 3. To be able to select a different walk animaiton for each character would be another way of avoiding a uniform look (allows for more variation but more work for the "animator"). 4. If you could include some variations in the "follow" routines you might be able to get surprising results more easily than I initially imagined. For example, if each figure just has it's own "speed" then a collision-avoidance aspect might tend to make the figures walk/run around each other, resulting in apparently complex behaviour. Might have to watch out for the possibility of an infinite loop in trying to ensure figures don't get too close to each other (assuming each figure is moved for each frame, rather than all frames calculated for 1 figure after another - which still might have unforseen "issues"). 5. Wow - even without "keep feet above a custom 'ground' geometry" feature I'm already gagging to try out the results of such a project! Argh! Well done that man :) Cheers, Cliff

Attached Link: Follow3.AVI (434 KB)

Well, take a look at this clip. Now the figures keep their distance, there's no "marching band" (because the script can be run at any frame), and the third guy has a different animation and walking speed. The variations to the routines should be quite easy to implement. I don't know if I can get the figure to follow a ground mesh but I'll do something to avoid the sliding feet effect.

scourge, this is totally AWESOME!!! WOW!!

This rocks. A question. Can you habe only one ball as the "leader", or could you have three balls connected to a "sidebar", and each figure following a different ball. This would allow you to have figures walking next to each other. Then putting extra figures behind each of those, you could have a squad marching, for instance. By bending the "sidebar" into a V shape you could have different formations, like planes flying in a V. That is if the script would allow you to have muliple leader objects. Can't wait to play with this.

As I understand it (and judging by the animations) yes - in fact I believe each of those figures is following the thing immediately in front of them (which is why they stay in a line). One of my interests will be to set them all following the ball rather than each other, to see them (hopefully) work around each other, try and take short-cuts to where the ball is and be much less apparently organised than follow2 or even follow3. It's looking amazing and WANNA PLAY! Cheers, Cliff

Attached Link: Follow4.AVI (572 KB)

numanoid, Yes, each character can follow any object or character. You can have figures walking next to each other, but when they have to turn the row breaks because the distance they have to walk differs. So you could have an army walking straight but turning would be a problem, unless I do some changes to the script. Currently the script only walks one character at a time but it's probably a piece of cake to make it affect multiple characters at the same time. who3d, Yes, the guys are all following a different target (either the guy in front or the ball). Currently they can't take short cuts or avoid objects, other than stop when there's someone on the way (like in the video clip). I'll try to create some kind of simple path finding routine. I'm also working on the animation because the default walking anim doesn't work when a character stops or slows down.

Don't get me wrong - what you've done is simply superb. I just want you to do more . I'd imagine that if a charcter can't go forward (blocked by a slower figure) it'd be an idea to make it move left or right - side-step - if at all possible. Perhaps if there were "near" and "far" boundaries set you might have time to make figures turn before they get so close tha they have to stop or side-step. I'd base which way to turn on what side of the figure in front the "stopped" figure is (e.g. if left on center, move left). This is where I see potential speed problems coming in (and the possibility for endless loops) where you have numerous "Low-Res Vicky 1 in a temple with a sword" running after a frightened Michael 2... it'd be possible for a character to get "trapped" amongst other figures, unable to go forward or to either side (and probably with another Vicky coming up from behind). Greater minds than I can probably come up with realistic approaches, perhaps the best one being to limit the number of checks and tell animators not to be so lazy but "get in there" and do some of the work themselves . Cheers, Cliff

Oops - nearly forgot. Although I'm sure that Ockham wrote a "keep figure above a customer floor geometry" script I can't find it anywhere - but it lead me to consider something else that'd be neat - an option to follow in the Y axis. For flying pteranodons, birds, millenium dragons and the like. Just a thought :) Cheers, Cliff

Ockham made his "walk this way" script (the one that keeps things over ground), but I THINK he told me not so long ago that it is now implemented in his Eureka script. Please correct me if I'm wrong, ockham :o) So the possibility is definately there :o) is also imagining stuff like flying thingies now

I can't see it in Eureka (judging by the readme) but someone calling themselves "svdl" released a "walkthiswayv2" pythin script into freestuff in Jan this year... might have to check that. My current best thought on the flying thing was to use a flying animation (a 30 frame cycle) in the Walk Designer and then use Ockham's "walk this way" script (now maybe svdl's wtw2) to bump the flying creature up over a "ground" mesh, then probably remove the mesh so that it doesn't show that a false floor was used to move the creature... ...however, a script that makes a creature follow a prop in x/y/z axis (and optionally "tilts" the figure so that it's always pointing at the target) would do an even better job IMHO. Hmmm, the possibilities! Cheers, Cliff

Walk this way is by svdl, and always was. He said he was working on a four legged version at the moment. It is a great script, because it stops the slide (ice skating effect) that you sometimes get when doing walking or running animations. The way I understand it, and I may be wrong, is that any object can be the leader, and this doesn't have to be used only on walking figures. As long as your following figure as a "hip", it will follow the leader. So could this be used to make a aircraft, or numerous aircraft follow a prop. If it is aircaft, the turning on a "3 balls on a sidebar" shouldn't be a problem, because there is no actual walk animation, hust a onject folloing a ball. I think this script is amazing. I animated a space fight with about 50 spaceships and suffered to get them to move properly, but if I could just have had a bal to move around and they followed the ball it would have been so much easier, or the parts where one spaceship had to be following the other one. Another question, if I have the ball as leader, and a character following the ball, can a camera be made to follow the character? The camera does not have a "hip", but it would be a good way of doing tracking, better than parenting, possibly.

parent the camera to an invisible character (who has a hip). Ockham took down his "walk this way" pythin script when svdl made a better version (walk this way 2) available.

Sorry about the confusion about the walk this way script. I joined these forums after Ockham took down his script, so I only have the version 1 and 2 by svdl. I didn't know Ockham had one previously, but I read in another thread that he had. Thanks for the tip about parenting to invisible character. I wish someone would right a proper tracking script for a camera that works the way the one in Vue'd Sprit does. Simply parenting the camera to the object does not give the same effect. The tracking script needs to have a slight delay, as though the camera is trying to keep up with the object it is tracking. Otherwise it looks as though the object is standing still and you are just moving the background around.

I've been out of town this weekend but I'm going back home today, I'll then check out that "walk this way" script, which indeed sounds great. I hope it doesn't take too much CPU time. Of course any object can follow a target, and it's actually a lot easier when there's no walking animation involved. A camera is also an actor, I think, so using the script you could have the camera follow a target, but you'd of course have to point the camera at the target using the "Point at" option. Who3d, your suggestions are on my "things to do" list. Shouldn't be a big problem to have the characters avoid obstacles on the way.

Attached Link: Follow5.AVI (63 KB)

Here's a small update. Now the objects can avoid obstacles on their way. The object plans its route again every frame and takes the shortest possible route. As you can see from the video clip the object doesn't have to do any "sidesteps" nor does it move straight at any obstacle. To simplify the process I only did this with balls but walking figures should work well too. What I am going to do next: - edit the route finder function to support multiple obstacles on the way and find the best route out of all the possibilities (i.e. if there are 10 obstacles). - edit it some more so that the object detects where the obstacles are moving (if they are) and calculates the routes based on that data - heck a lot of other things I checked that "walk this way" script. It's pretty good and I could probably add something like that to this follow script. If only I could make it a little faster...

Wow! Soccer in Poser!!! Great!! :o)))

The video clip may need some explanation. The big red ball was animated to get on the white ball's way, so that it would be noticeable that the route is recalculated every frame. Soccer? That would be cool.

Hmm. And... School-kiddies being taken for a trip somewhere (with teachers ushering)... Jet-fighters in formation... Sausages on a production line (or is that the same as the school-kiddies? :-) )... Shoppers in a mall... Lawyers (ambulance-chasers) to an accident..:-)) Athletes in a race... (This is just a bookmark btw..) This whole idea looks very promising. Will await events.. Excellent work! Cheers, Diolma

Oh joy! I'd started worrying that this thread might have died :( A flock of gulls, pteranodons, Millenium Dragons, dinosaurs, horses running in a field, Daleks moving around parked cars in central London, sperm seeking their target, salmon swimming upriver - possibly even leaping up waterfalls, ants rampaging through the undergrowth, bees chasing winnie-the-pooh - nah, this kind of script will never catch on. As for football/soccer - I suppose actually it WOULD be possible to add in rules to control the passing of a ball around... but even ignoring the CPU time that whole thing would require, just the Poser rendering time would make it the slowest game of soccer EVER! Cheers, Cliff

Oh no, this thread ain't going to die before I finish these scripts. The path finding part is coming along nicely, the objects now find their way around a number of obstacles. I'll post another clip when I've tweaked it a little.

Attached Link: Follow6.AVI (63 KB)

Okay, the path finding works better now, the object can now avoid multiple obstacles. This isn't perfect yet though because it doesn't always find the quickest route. I'm still going to make it a little better but the porpose of the path finder is to avoid other objects and characters, not navigate through a labyrinth or any other complex environment.

Ooh it's GREAT! I can't help wondering if Bushi's what-did-he-call-it-thing he used for his targeting/posing script could be used here. I don't understand WHAT the script does other than it seems to keep calculating the new possibilities of each movement. Perhaps that could make this one always find the quickest route?

Years ago I read an article on route-finding in real time. It was something to do with routing telephone calls through exchanges. Aparrently it was sometimes taking a VERY long time to find the shortest path. Then some people (Cambridge students, if memory serves) came up with an idea. The basic algorithm was still used to start with, but after a short time, if it appeared that there were going to be many more choices, the algorithm just picked a nuumber of routes at random and chose the shortest of those. Everyone was happy, because callers weren't kept waiting while the computer (which in those days was a lot slower than we have now, but the principle still holds) trawled its way through thousands of possiblities trying to find the quickest route. And taking a l-o-o-o-n-g time finding it:-) Just thought I'd share that - someone may find it useful.. Cheers, Diolma

Well, Bushi's script uses genetic algorithms, which can be also used to find the quickest route out of many options. But I don't think the scripts have much in common, bushi's script is only for posing. I know some algorithms for path finding, including the famous A* which is probably the most commonly used one. These algorithms find always the best route but they are only good for working with a very limited grid, say a 100x100 sized one. I ended up creating a totally different kind of algorithm, which is fast unlike the others but unfortunately also less precise. But it's getting better all the time and I think I can make it good enough to have a bunch of characters moving around without collisions.

Actually, scourge, unless there's a specific reason for it, there's probably no need to find "best/quickest path". If you observe people in (say) a pedestrianised shopping centre, they often don't choose a best path - just the one that comes to mind when they realise they're about to bump into something if they continue the way they're going, unless they've over-imbibed of course, in which case they use the "drunkards walk":-). Hmm. Perhaps it might be an idea to be able to set "way-points" along the route - or is that going beyond the realms of the script you're writing? Keep up the good work.. Cheers, Diolma

You hit it pretty well diolma. The script uses way-points for the route: at first the object has one way-point, the destination, which is the target object. Then the scripts checks if the road is clear for moving straight at the destination. If there are obstacles then new way-points are created to avoid those obstacles. The script also checks the gaps between the new way-points and creates more of them until all the routes to the destination are clear. This is the point where intelligent path finding would come to play. Currently the script always chooses the shortest routes, which doesn't necessarily mean the shortest path from the starting poing to the destination.

I agree that shortest or "best" path isn't necessary for my needs - just A decent path is more than good enough. More useful would be the ability to affect the smoothness of paths/number of waypoints - so that one could make mechanical things "clunkier" (perhaps) while organics might tend to turn more smoothly, if you follow. As always when one of these python gurus develops a script with the users... exciting times! Cheers, Cliff

Good news, I have the path finding algorithm ready now it always finds the best path... and it isn't too heavy on system resources: I tried with 10 obstacles on the way and the best path was calculated in about 1 second. Things were getting too messy and difficult with Python so I decided to re-make the whole path finder in Visual Basic. I wrote an app which creates a path between two points and connects the way-points so that I can actually see the path. The attached image is a screen shot of the application.

As you can see the path is now smooth and the shortest distance from the moving object to the obstacle is object radius + obstacle radius. So what does this mean? It means that all the objects are considered circle-shaped in the X-Z axis which also works fine for humans and other rather small characters, but if the obstacle is really big and not circle-shaped (i.e. a truck) the script doesn't work that well.

I've got too many projects in the works now but I'm working on these scripts always when I find some time. Next I'll have to convert the algorithm into Python and try it in Poser...

Presumably for "too big" objects one would simply substitute a number of smaller objects which take up the space (approximately) of the large object (e.g. building) to be avoided :) Cheers, Cliff

Not being the fastest to finish things myself and "put them out there" - I really really want this routine so thought I'd be cheeky and say "How's it Goin'?"

When I write programs or scripts my little projects (like the MAT Pose Edit application) often begin to grow and I can't put an end to it. And though I've done it a few times I don't like releasing any work-in-progress stuff. But since I can't be sure how long it will take to finish all the detailed algorithms I'm working on I'll make an exception this time. I'll try to cut the 100% working parts from the project and release that script tomorrow. So, please check back in a day. Thanks, Ilari

Ilari, Been following this thread off and on, nad I have to say it's a killer script -- very interested in seeing it come out.

Good on yer scourge! :)

Attached Link: http://koti.mbnet.fi/~ilaripih/Follow.py

Thanks ynsaen and who3d. Okay, not a big suprise that I crossed my "deadline" by a couple of days. Some of the walking animations looked really silly and I found out it was because of the Hip's rotation. So I changed the script to only affect the Body actor. The good thing is that the animations now work correctly, and the bad thing is that the animation can't be saved as a pose file... well not until I have finished my script which writes pose files that include the Body actor. Here's how to use the script: Before running the script select the figure that will do the walking. 1. Pose file: Type the file name and full path of the walk animation 2. Frame count: The amount of frames to be used, the first frame being the current frame 3. Frames in loop: The amount of frames in the walk animation file 4. Speed: Speed of the walking character (you'll have the correct speed when the feet don't slide) 5. Target figure: The name of the target figure. Leave empty if the target is a prop 6. Target actor: The name of the target actor. Usually "Body" or name of a prop. I had to cut a lot of functionality from the script to make it work correctly. There's no path-finding/detection of obstacles and the script only works for characters that walk on the ground. I'll soon upload a script that works for flying creatures. Ilari