Linking People to a Flow

You can link pedestrians to other objects, in order to move them or rotate them. You can also link pedestrians to a flow, in order to facilitate moving the flow, having flows on different levels, and so on.

By default, idlers are linked to their seat or idle area. But by default, pedestrians are not linked to their flow. The reason for this is that character spawning can cause the same pedestrian to appear on more than one flow.

If your scene contains a single flow, linking is easy. If it contains multiple flows, then you have a couple of options.

• Single flow

  Click to activate (Select And Link), select all the pedestrians on the flow, then drag to the flow itself and release the mouse when the cursor shows the link icon.

  Important: Link the pedestrians only after you are finished animating the flow. Clicking Simulate again will erase the link.
• Multiple flows: XRef method
  1. Set up a flow, link the pedestrians to the flow, then save the MAX scene.
  2. In a new scene, use XRef Scene or XRef Objects to reference the original flow.
  3. Create a new flow with its own set of pedestrians.
• Multiple flows: Regenerate method
  1. Set up multiple flows.
  2. For the first flow, select the pedestrians, and then click (Regenerate Selected).

     This method is a bit tedious, because you need to move through the animation to make sure you have selected and regenerated every pedestrian on the flow.

     Regenerate Selected applies to only the current spawn, so when you regenerate all the pedestrians on the flow, you have a set of unique pedestrians.

  3. Use (Select And Link) to link the pedestrians to the flow.
  4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for each flow in the scene.