How to create a bustling crowd simulation in Blender 2.8 

Absolutely. I would dig into the boid specific settings around enemies and friends, you really could make good use of that (though careful, you don’t want particles to actually “die” as then they’ll disappear or remain stationary)

yeah this kinda important for an army(i think)

Really warms my heart, though sometimes I feel my channel can be a little eclectic, I'm very glad to hear it has been useful across different areas!

It's hard to find a thorough crowd sim tutorial, thank you for this!

@@mdp7193 glad to hear you enjoyed it! Thanks for the timestamps work there - you made me realize RU-vid wasn't picking the ones I already wrote in the description because I skipped the 00:00 intro section, now they are showing up on the video as chapters.

Glad it helped! Many ways to do the same thing, but yes - difference performance implications depending on the approach.

Glad you enjoyed! And absolutely, Blender is a tool and is not the right tool for every job. Programs like Massive for crowd sims are where it’s at, but it never hurts to know how to push your generalist tool like Blender to the max.

Try clearing your cache or changing the seed, and then ensure that the time that each particle lives is more than 500 frames.

Thanks it worked

Unfortunately, there are inherent limitations in this approach. There may be some clever things you could do in the material shading of the grass object itself to influence displacement based on proximity to meshes, but I'm not aware of that working for particles itself. Making wind effects though on itself is not hard at all, you can even import the MCprep tall grass to see a prefab of how that is set up using the displacement modifier and a cloud noise texture.

@@TheDuckCow Ok

Glad you liked it. As for cloth sim, I may in the future, but no guarantees. I've done some very quick overviews of how I deal with it in behind the scenes videos (see the "Whirlwind" videos for Sometimes and Destroy You on my channel), otherwise I know there are at least some tutorials out there already (for Minecraft/Blender specifically) and I'm not sure I'll be able to add too much more than those already cover. But let me know if you find one (or two) that fall short of your needs, maybe you can compel me to make my own taking a synthesis from all!

@@TheDuckCow Oh great, I looked at some of the cloth simulation settings of the rigs from your MCPrep and I tried out myself. It somehow, kinda works! You sorta asked me to tell you if I find anything that helped me. But it's you 😅

@@TheDuckCow I scaled my rig all the way up to six times and the cloth glitches are gone, thanks to your example rig. ( My rig was so tiny) lol

@@xanecosmo5061 Ah so that's interesting, the cloth sim got more stable when you had higher overall scale of the model? Those things can be funny for sure. Could has have to do with the exterior/interior depth of the collision objects, something I often end up playing with (that and having hidden, simpler collider objects inside the mesh, rather than making e.g. the torso itself the collision object)

It's a good question! It also shows under the hood how things are working. Blender particle systems are calculated on a frame by frame basis. Frame one, a point is in one position. Then the simulation runs, and the only output is the next position. There's no inherent datapoint for "velocity" or "direction", just the final landing point on each frame. The direction fixes itself after one frame because the software adds an extra, post-simulation step to see "ok, where was this point on the previous point" and based on that you get the velocity and direction. Generally speaking, it's always best to have your simulations (including particle sims) start one one frame, but then have your scene actually start rendering some frames later to let things "settle". I typically use a buffer of 10-15 frames just in case I need it, so my animations start rendering from e.g. frame 15 onwards.

@@TheDuckCow Ooo... Great explanation...

Was it maybe HP Binary/Boxscape and The Labs? I shared a rough version of this workflow before which they ran with.

The trouble is that, unless you only have one entire character to spawn with no variations, you run into the issue that particle emitters only emit one object at a time. There's a hack (which may not still work, haven't tested) where you end up creating a single mesh for your character, and a single armature. You make all the meshes part of the collection used in the particle spawner, but the armatures are *not* part of that collection. However it may run into dependency issues, again haven't tried recently myself

@@TheDuckCow thank you so much for your detailed explanations! I am creating a trade show simulation and definitely I will try out the solution. Also the emitted instance I created always moving out of the boundary. The bigger the boundary is, the less obvious bleeding is happening, is there a way to fully contain the movement within the boundary?

@@MrHahajoe Best bet would probably be adding additional (non-rendered) colliders where you need, good luck!

@@TheDuckCow you are the best!

Will see about that for future tutorials that are long in length!

Not sure I follow the quesiton, but there should be a setting for "show emitter", turn this off on your particle object if it's a fake floor (as done in this tutorial), or keep it on if you just used some meshes from your actual world.

@@TheDuckCow , ok, i'll try your tip, thanks

Hi, if you never entered the Nether in the world, then it wasn't generated yet - thus Mineways has nothing to load. Similarly, it will have only loaded areas of the nether that have been visited, so might be good to know specific coordinates from in game to jump to.

Perhaps a video like this is useful? Also using MCprep (though a much, much earlier version of it) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Nax7iuCTovk.html

Sorry I missed this one! If you didn't figure it out, you go into edit mode on the mesh, press p, and then separate by materials.

The Blender 2.8 Obj importer appears to join all meshes together, as you say. Easiest thing to do is go into edit mode, press p, and then select separate by material - then exit edit mode and you should have each block type as a separate material as before.

I think I understand, the issue is that it chooses one mesh at a time. The easiest thing would be for you to join all body parts together for a given character. The next best thing you could do is create a collection of just instances of the character (as opposed to the character itself with the armature), and put that into a collection used as an input. Main point is: you want 1 object in the source collection to be an entire character.

@@TheDuckCow Thank you! Will try those out. To clarify, would I join the parts together by parenting them? I'm new to blender. And I'm guessing if I made a collection of instances of the characters, that would help performance in blender?

@@TheDuckCow I tried both methods and the joining the parts seems to work. I couldn't figure out how to get a collection of instances to work though. Also my new issue is that my characters are laying down and not facing the direction they should be walking.

@@middleton3d Could be that there isn't a real way to get collection instances to work, tbh I haven't tried it in 2.8+ but I know it sort of workt (though was hacky and had some side effects) in 2.7. For your character issue, try playing around with the different rotation / phase offsets under particle settings. E.g. try even z-up, or as a last resort just rotate your characters in edit mode (a pain if you have armature modifiers though).

@@TheDuckCow Maybe, hopefully they will update that soon because then it would be a much more powerful tool. Thanks again for the tips!

Are there eyes and mouths in the texture of the skin itself? A few of the out of the box ones that come with MCprep specifically have the eyes and mouth removed, which are better for rigs that have geometry-based faces.

@@TheDuckCow ohh so that's the problem, I was switching it to the ones that came with mcprep, but one more thing, and this is about moving actual characters, can you make a video on how to animate individual characters? I feel like there are some things in the character rigs in mcprep that are different from the others I've seen, thanks!

@@hd_entertainment0327 These should be pretty standard to most rigs, and in fact many of the rigs come from other packs commonly used like BoxScape studio. That being said, I did create at least this video on the built in steve/generic player rig: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-lgrgE9UXQJk.html

Not really, or at least not without some clever hacking. The way you could get that to work is if your armature controlled rig at least had all the meshes combined into one object per rig, and then put al those objects (the objects, not the armatures controlling those objects) into a single collection. Even then it might not work quite as you hope, but that’s a start. If looking for something more advanced, I’d look into the CrowdMaster addon

@@TheDuckCow Ok good to know.

then don't add collisions or make the collision plane smaller.

Matt 476 yes, with some effort. You can’t make intricate actions or logic (like everyone is either in a running phase, or in a “killed” state etc). But I definitely know people who have made it work, at least for the majority of shots. Then you fill in custom animation for the foreground where relevant.

TheDuckCow would you be able to work on a project. If so can you contact me on discord? My ign is Matt476# 1269.

I (Patrick aka TheDuckCow) am just some rando person who makes animations and blender addons. Boxscape is a completely different but cool group of animators and asset creators for Minecraft, who have contributed some resources for me to use in releasing MCprep.

@@TheDuckCow I want to make rigs maybe ı can make rigs for you and maybe to boxscape studio

It's not for Mobile it's for PC only

@@happyjay8141 I mean mobile prop for player in animation