Entity scaling and speed issues

[steve...@gmail.com]

Seems like all the default settings in Golaem are set up on the assumption that Maya's default units are meters and not cms.

Nicolas explained why this is in one of last year's Golaem Academy videos, and while it made sense (and cleared up some confusion for me even though I'm a 20+ year Maya user), as I'm learning Golaem it is leading to a lot of confusion about how to deal with this when working at a different scale.

In particular I'm using assets from the character pack with an environment that is 100x larger. In practice, this seems to be how most studios use scale in Maya, with one unit equaling one centimeter, not one meter, so environments and other assets are generally x100 larger than anything in the Golaem character pack.

Currently I'm trying to use the most basic beGoto and beNavigation nodes with some characters to set up some pedestrians. The beGoto is working, but the characters are barely moving because of the exponentially larger scale. What's the correct workflow for scaling velocity in this scenario? Can't see anything obvious on this node.

With cars I had a similar problem but was able to increase the speed in the beTraffic node to get an acceptable result. Not sure if this is the correct method either though.

Would it not be possible to build a "world scale" attribute into Golaem somewhere to deal with this scale problem, which presumably crops up a lot.

Failing that, would be great if there were some practical tutorials addressing this issue specifically.

[Nicolas Chaverou]

Hey there,

All your questions are answered here

First the Crowd Unit needs to set based on the environment

Then you can rescale your characters using the crowdfield / manager

Best

Le 16 juin 2023 à 19:23, steve...@gmail.com <steve...@gmail.com> a écrit :



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[steve...@gmail.com]

OK, thanks for the link. I think this has finally clicked for me.

So, the Crowd Unit is essentially the Environment Scale. Just to give a bit of newbie feedback, I think it's the terminology that's maybe caused me to take this long to understand this.

The Crowd Unit defines your world scale, entities are then just scaled up or down accordingly.

Is there a good workaround if you've got a scene that's been set up incorrectly but is working? Can I have more than one Crowd Manager node in a single scene, with differing Crowd Unit settings?

[Nicolas Chaverou]

Hey there,

See inlined

On Fri, Jun 16, 2023 at 8:35 PM steve...@gmail.com <steve...@gmail.com> wrote:

OK, thanks for the link. I think this has finally clicked for me.

So, the Crowd Unit is essentially the Environment Scale. Just to give a bit of newbie feedback, I think it's the terminology that's maybe caused me to take this long to understand this.

As Maya named this parameter Linear Working Unit, we decided to align on their terminology :)

 

The Crowd Unit defines your world scale, entities are then just scaled up or down accordingly.

Is there a good workaround if you've got a scene that's been set up incorrectly but is working? Can I have more than one Crowd Manager node in a single scene, with differing Crowd Unit settings?

No, I'm afraid you'll have to recreate your nodes

Only one unit can be set per scene (similarly to the Maya Linear Working Unit)

Best,

[steve...@gmail.com]

Thanks, I saw that only one Crowd Manager per scene is allowed in the docs shortly after asking.

I'm confused about caching, however, and how the caching system works. I have a car sim and a pedestrian sim in the same file. Is it possible -- as per Maya's normal caching paradigm -- to cache these completely independently of one another? The Sim Exporter has a window at the top with "Crowdfield Nodes to Export" and a list of my two crowdfields in it (carCrowdField and pedestrianCrowdField), which I took to mean only the selected crowd field would be exported. Having exported these separately to two different, independently named cache sequences, I'd intuitively expect the whole scene to play back cached regardless of any other settings (maybe to complicate matters the car sim was run in meters, the pedestrians run in centimeters. However, once cached surely these units should become redundant?). That doesn't happen -- I can only get one or the other to play back.

I notice there is a "glmCaches" group in the outliner containing "cacheProxy1" node, which is reading the carCrowdField cache, but is only listing the casualWoman entity in the "characters" field. No idea why this would be -- the casual car is loaded and plays back correctly.

Of course it's probably user error but I'm having a hard time understanding how this all works. If there were a way to explicitly choose or create a "cacheProxy" node on caching the sim that I'd overlooked, this would make sense, but I don't see any such option in the sim exporter window.

[Nicolas Chaverou]

Hey there,

Tried to answer most of it in the following video

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6t1iwxoixil7ax2/caches.mp4?dl=0

This is also explained here

https://golaem.com/content/doc/golaem-crowd-documentation/dealing-large-crowd-simulations

And here:

https://golaem.com/content/doc/golaem-crowd-documentation/creating-lighting-rendering-scene

Let us know if you have any additional questions

Best,

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[steve...@gmail.com]

Much thanks.... especially for the custom tutorial ;)

I think one of the things that's been throwing me is the connections being made automatically. Is there a reason paths to caches show as being "connected" in this way? This also seems to be outside of the normal Maya paradigm for things like external caches, which normally do not show as a connection especially if they are paths which can be edited. Making this a hardwired connection seems to suggest it shouldn't be messed with, but it seems like once this connection is broken there's no reason not to repath or edit in the normal way.

[Nicolas Chaverou]

Hey,

Inlined below

On Tue, Jun 20, 2023 at 9:09 PM steve...@gmail.com <steve...@gmail.com> wrote:

Much thanks.... especially for the custom tutorial ;)

I think one of the things that's been throwing me is the connections being made automatically. Is there a reason paths to caches show as being "connected" in this way?

That just allows to simplify the pipeline / reduce user errors as what's shown is always the last simulation exported

 

This also seems to be outside of the normal Maya paradigm for things like external caches, which normally do not show as a connection especially if they are paths which can be edited.

This is also why studios heavily build tools around Maya caches as their paradigms can be sometimes weak and error prone (as caching is imho)

This having been said, there's a difference between an attribute being connected and locked : connected is just to conveniently specify a default value - you can break the connection anytime and edit whatever you need (at least in any of the Golaem nodes)

Locked means it's driven by something else and should not be manually edited

Best,