Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svat3yydx1g

How to animate a crowd standing around doing nothing. Note people do not stand like statues, so we are building up a collection of minor shuffles etc.

The aim of this tutorial is to show you how you can reuse bits and pieces of your existing mocap collection to create this minor pieces of animation.

You could go to the carnegie mocap collection and get some animation source for free, but that would require some tiday up before use.

In this case then I am working from poser ready ani-blocks from the DAZ3d store.

The "work" involved is to extract out these standing mini animations. I show my own collection of 15, and how to perform the extraction.

In part 2 we get down to the business of applying these clips to the crowd (again as quick and easy as possible).

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note. Part 2 out tomorrow.

Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsQc1j8EkDU

** PART 2 **

How to animate a crowd standing around doing nothing (Part 2). As people do not stand like statues, we are applying minor shuffles etc.

In part 2 we get down to the business of applying these clips to the crowd (again as quick and easy as possible).

I find however that it's a lot quicker if your source figure exactly matches your target figure (bone structure). Therefore an M3 to M3 is good.

In my case, the target figures are subsets of the source figure (a Lorenzo Lo Rez), and I encounter some problems with feet and arms .

In part 3 I solve these issues and complete the project.

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This is really very good Steve. I don't use cararra, or I'd have more to say, but I can see how much work is in this.

Thanks airflames,

It is still a lot of work yes. esp. when the bones dont match between the source skeleton and the target skeleton.

Part 3 (out tomorrow) discusses how to minimize this inconvenience.

Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-VKmdLOePE

Part 3 (final part)

How to animate a crowd standing around doing nothing (Part 3). This video addresses ways of fixing animations copied from different skeletons.

In part 3 I clarify that using Fenrics plugin to copy animation data between models using the same bone structure works fine.

I then look at how to compensate for different skeleton structures. Specifically one which is a subset of the other.

I also show one half of the completed animation. Note that all of these figures could be replicated so the scene can look a lot more crowded that it does now. My record for a mixture of copying and replicating is 132 figures in a scene (with lots of scenery around them).

more at
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