Blender path finding
Description
I made this as a comp4 A2 computing project. It was a path finding system made in blender using python and the blender game engine API. I spent quite a while getting this working and you can look at my documentation and my .blend file.
here is a snippet of the documentation. I met my client at the animation 14 competition in the university of Manchester where he was trying to persuade people to go on his blender animation course. I had already had previous experience using blender and i was very interested so we started talking. I mentioned that i was taking computing a2 and he offered that he would host my project because he needed a program for his film. I have been sent this email from Pete Kemp my project client. "I run a small film studio and we have a need to simulate groups of soldiers for an upcoming short film we are making about the first world war. The soldiers will automatically take cover from which ever position we place them as if they were under artillery fire. We have started to animate this for each soldier individually, but the process is very tedious and we don't have the resource to do this, especially as we want several shots with different sets where the soldiers take cover. We are looking for an automatic solution which can automatically set up the soldier movement which can be used on a range of shots. There will be up for 30 soldiers in each shot. I'm the executive producer of the studio." So the background of the problem is that I have a film director in need of a time and money saving way of making soldiers run and duck in cover independently and realistically for a movie. Without this it would have to be done by hand and this is a massive waste of time and money to get what is essentially props to behave as they should. What they currently do is get people to move soldiers by hand individually and animate them to move to places and shoot and duck. This requires having to make the 3d models for the soldiers and then make a skeleton "rig" which will move the model like a puppet and then make several animations for the soldier and then plot and move them all to their designated positions and have them look like they are hiding and shooting .This is way too much work to be done individually and will distract people from paying attention to the main story part of the movie. My help would take out a significant section of this process. My proposed solution is to code a simple artificial intelligence(AI) that will do what soldiers in a battle would normally do like weigh up the options to duck left, right or other directions or to run back or who to shoot and to purposely miss some shots and to chose cover naturally counting on closeness and quality of cover and which direction its facing to make it look like the setting. I will use python integrated with blender. Blender is a free software by the blender foundation that is used for 3d modelling, animation, movie production and game making(see tiers of steel and Sintel which are short films made in blender). The blender coding interface uses python integrated with blenders built in functions like ray sensors and always sensors. I will use radar sensors to look around and imitate a solders line of sight and they will analyse objects they see and chose which to go for. This is all planning at the moment so it may be different when I am actually trying to get it to work. It requires a lot of mathematical knowledge and computing concepts which is handy as i am taking both for a2.
Images
Blender images
