Programs used: Massive, Maya, Renderman 19  |  Responsible for all aspects

For this project I have become familiar with massive and mastering its user interface while building a brain with vision. I wanted to create a large crowd of toy ducks navigating a moving water / wave terrain.

First I started by creating a terrain in Houdini 13 using the ocean shelf tool and exported an .obj sequence to get my animated terrain into massive. To import a sequence of the animated terrain I hit File -> load terrain. From here I selected the first frame of the .obj sequence and replaced the frame numbers with #### so it reads through the entire sequence. Once I have created the terrain I then started to develop the brain to navigate, and follow the terrain.

To create the vision for the ducks bring in an input node and in the source channel label it box1:vision.x followed by 3 fuzz nodes. These fuzz nodes will be labeled left center and right. for the left and right nodes you will want to select the parabola third curve curve from left giving the left a negative value and the right a positive value. For the center node you will want to select the second from the right curve. make sure that the center curve point is set at zero. This will give your agent vision on the x axis. A similar process will be completed to create vision for x lefts and x rights.  Additional to the input on the X axis you will also want to create vision on the z axis. Here we will create fuzz nodes for near and nearish. For extreme right node you will want to use the S curve and give it a positive value, and for the Nearish node you will want to select the 2nd curve “and” nodes are then created for left and near, center and near, and right and near.