I am proud to anounce, that I have finished my bachelor thesis on april 11th. In the practical part now I developed a simulation of a crowded marketplace with autonomous agents that follow the behaviors: Wander, Idle, Sit, Buy something and dynamically start a dialog.

The simulation mainly uses the AI community solutions: Behave (AngryAnt), UnitySteer (Arges Systems) and A* Pathfinding (Aron Granberg). On top of these librarys I developed some extensions.

The main feature behind the scenes is a new Containment Behavior for UnitySteer, that now can handle Obstacles of any shape. I extended the original idea of the steering inventor Craig Reynolds to handle concave corners in the obstacle shape too. In addition to that it is now possible to define the container line for this behavior via the A* grid that is used by the A* pathfinding module. This way there can be made any changes in the world geometry while the container automatically adjustes its position.

I will give more insights of my work in the following weeks and intent to make a stable release of the Containment Behavior to share with the community.

In the past time I studied the workflow of recording, preparation and usage of motion capture data in the gameengine environment. Related to the planning and organisation of mocap-recordings this article seemed to me as the most informative as it covers the most subjects from conception up to working with actors.

At the moment I have to reduce the amount of necessary work for my bachelor thesis to get it finished soon enough. Because of that my last discovery came very situated.

The Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) hosts a big online MoCap database. The quality of the recordings mostly is really good.

I also found a version of this MoCap database that has been optimized for Motionbuilder on cgspeed.com.

After I had downloaded the files and tested some animations in Motionbuilder I had to find a way to optimize the animations for the gameengine:

That means:

• positioning of the character on the origin
• view of the character in negative z-direction
• The movement of the hip-joint has to be fixed to the y-axis
• The movement has to be cutted, so that it can be repeated in a cycle
• The jitter between the last and the first frame has to be removed

For this requirements and a lot of more there is a very handy tool out there: bvhacker. Though its just for BVH-Files its exactly the right tool for the format I wanted to use.

After the loop has been created, the animation has to be allocated to the character. This is done fast now in Motionbuilder.