animating people wandering in a room

[dellatails]

Hi everyone,

I'm new here. I got a task of creating a virtual envirionment with avatars walking around in a room. Does anyone have any idea about how to do it efficiently? Should I first build the room model and avatars in Maya and load them into Vizard, or can I directly do it in Vizard. Also, a key problem is how to animate people walking around in the room? Any suggestion will be very much appreciated!

Della

[farshizzo]

Hi,

Vizard does not allow you to create content. You will have to first build the 3d files in a program such as 3DS Max or Maya. Once you have the content, animating the avatars shouldn't be too difficult. The avatars that come with Vizard already have walking animations. Vizard also comes with a module that allows you to specify locations for an avatar to walk to, and it will handle the animations for you. Search the documentation for the walkto command for more information. Let me know if you need anymore help.

[dellatails]

Hi farshizzo, thanks a lot for these helpful tips And it looks that Vizard provides some avatar models that I can use, so maybe I'll just build the room in Maya and load it. One more question, is there anyway that I can generate a set of walking paths (randomly would be more desirable) for each avatar instead of specifying the target locations using "walkto"? Thanks a lot!

Della

[farshizzo]

Hi,

This is very easy to do with Vizard. I've attached some sample code that will have the avatar walk to a random location every time the spacebar is pressed. Let me know if something isn't clear.

import viz
viz.go()

#Initialize environment
viz.clearcolor(viz.GRAY)
viz.add('tut_ground.wrl')
viz.move(0,5,-20)
viz.lookat(0,0,0)

#Create an avatar
avatar = viz.add('female.cfg')

#Create a walk action that will randomly select a location between (-5,-5) and (5,5)
RandomWalkAction = vizact.walkto(vizact.randfloat(-5,5),0,vizact.randfloat(-5,5))

#Add walk action to avatar when spacebar is pressed
vizact.onkeydown(' ',avatar.add,RandomWalkAction)

[dellatails]

Hi farshizzo, thanks, the code looks very clear and helpful. Just one minor thing and it would be perfect.. how can I avoid keyboard input and just let the avatars working on their own randomly and endlessly?

I noted that in the gallery demo, they created an action using a bunch of actions.append(), and then called avatar.act(vizact.sequence(actions,viz.FOREVER)). Because I only have one random walk action, do I also need to create an action sequence first using actions.append? Many thanks!

[farshizzo]

Hi,

That's correct. If you want the avatar to walk endlessly then you would place the walk action inside a sequence and have it repeat forever. Here is what the code would look like:

#Create a walk action that will randomly select a location between (-5,-5) and (5,5)
WalkForever = vizact.sequence(vizact.walkto(vizact.randfloat(-5,5),0,vizact.randfloat(-5,5)),viz.FOREVER)

#Add walk action to avatar
avatar.add(WalkForever)