Crowd Levels Overview

Workflow

Crowd Levels are a concept that lets you make an infinite number of iterations with simulations and caches/layout.

The principle is that a cache and its layout can be re-imported into a new simulation, where it will be replayed on each entity as if it was a simple animation, through a Motion behavior.

Once the cache is replayed in the simulation, you can add new behaviors in parallel, create new entity types, or anything that is usually done in simulation.

• It's possible to go back in each level, change the simulation/the layout, and refresh everything up to the top level
• There is no limit in the number of levels that can be added on top of each other

Levels are handled by the Crowd Levels Manager: it lets you navigate through levels, and to add new ones.

When creating new golaem nodes at any level, they will automatically be grouped under a glmCrowdLevel_n Maya node, and inactive levels will be greyed out in the Outliner:

Limitations

There are a few limitations when importing a simulation cache within a new level simulation.

• Emit / Kill behaviors are not supported
• Poptools with emitters are not supported
• Kill / Unkill / Set Mesh Assets / Set Shader Attribute / Mirror Geometry layout nodes are not supported untill the final level
• Cloth simulation is not supported, it will be dismissed when reimporting the cache in the next level
• Ground adaptation may be innacurate, it's sometime better to disable it on imported entity types
• Skeleton overrides are not kept from one level to the next one but recomputed as dictated by the configuration rules