TIE-Fighter Crashing into Crowds

In this project, I am trying out crowds for the first time and also utilizing all my knowledge from the previous projects to create destruction of the TIE fighter crashing into the crowd. I have learned a lot from doing this project from learning how the crowds work to setting up a more complicated simulation with multiple sims. Overall, I think it turned out very cool but also still needs a lot of work.

When I was thinking of what I wanted to do, I saw this post on Linkedin about crowds that really interested me. Therefore, I started to learn how the crowd system works. Here are some of my experiments on different behaviors:

Originally, I was trying to create two groups of crowds and have interactions between them like the Linkedin video I found. However, after exploring how crowd behavior works, I started to realize that I was not going to be able to finish the project on time since I only had about 2 weeks left. It was really hard to make the monster punch the people at the right moment because of the animation timing.

Consequently, I decided to switch to another idea which is the TIE-fighter crashing into the crowds. The final result looks OK, but there are a lot of things I need to change.

Things I need to work on:

  • The fire explosion is out of scale. The scale of the fire is at least three times smaller than it should be which is why the smoke does not have any detail and has very less density.
  • Crowds are jiggling as they run, and the only difference between them is the skin color which is not very obvious in the render.
  • The model of the TIE fighter is not that great. Need to use PolyExtrude for the faces to have more detailed pieces instead of just a big chunk. (I might just find a better model instead)