Animate and render large number of complex rigs without overloading your GPU

If you already have finished rigs and do not want to have to re-rig them to fit the constraints of one of the few popular crowd simulation systems and you would like to manually tweak your rig for each character, CharacterCrowd was made for you.

Importantly:

• you won't need to animate your rig in a separate scene file
• you won't need to export gigantic mesh caches for each frame
• you don't have to do anything special to your rig
• you don't have to load heavy blendshapes/skinning information into memory more than once

1. Start with a referenced rig

2. Tell CharacterCrowd what is the parent controller, what are the controllers with keyable/animatable attributes and what are the base meshes that are needed for the final render

3. Pose and animate your referenced rig as needed for the character

4. Press "Generate Standin" then "Save standin"

5. Repeat 3 & 4 until all standins have been generated. To edit a stand-in or preview animation on that stand-in, select the standin node (arrow) then click "Edit Stand-in" and the reference rig will be positioned and keyed as the stand-in

6. Cache each standin - click on the stand-in controller and then "Cache Standin"

7. Ensure that the preRenderFrameMEL and postRenderFrameMel have been set

8. Render away and the standins will be replaced with the mesh animated

Copy / Git clone this repo to your maya plugins folder

Open Plugins Manager and if characterCrowd.py not visible scroll to bottom and Browse to find file

Open Gui with characterCrowdGui() in MEL script repl

Add ccPreRenderFrame to PostRenderFrameMEL and ccPostRenderFrame to PostRenderFrameMEL in your file's render settings

easy-install nose

<MAYA PYTHON PATH> ./src/runTests.py

Copyright 2016, Campbell Morgan

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.