Asset Manager Overview

Assets define the appearance of Crowd characters for rendering. It is possible to add variety in a scene by applying different assets on the same Entity Type. You could create an army of thousands of different people by using only one Entity Type and various assets. The asset tool will help you to define which assets should be distributed among your crowd entities and how to distribute them logically.
 
All assets used in Crowd characters must be contained in FBX files (see Character Prerequisites).
 
Assets are defined using the Crowd Assets Management tool, in the Assets tab. This tool can be accessed through:
  • Crowd shelf: 
  • Crowd menu: Assets Tool
  • MEL command: glmAssetsToolCmd;

  
Assets Manager Overview

The Assets Manager is composed by two tabs and a tool bar:
  • The Assets tab enables to load characters assets and organize them in Assets Groups. At render time, one Mesh Asset per Asset Group will be picked per character thus generating geometry diversity. The Shader Attributes enables to define attributes passed to the shader in order to generate shader diversity.
  • The Rendering Types tab enables to configure the way the geometric diversity will be generated. Each Mesh Asset can be assign a weight. The higher the weight, the more the Mesh Asset will appear in the crowds.The assign button enables to assign a Rendering Type to an Entity Type, hence defining the way characters from an Entity Type will be rendered. To be able to define rendering types, one must first define Assets Groups in the Assets tab.
  • The Tool bar allow to manage the Crowd Asset Management (.cam) file generated by the Assets Manager and provide utilities for handling the associated fbx files.

Assets Manager Tool Bar
 
  •  Open:  open an existing Crowd Asset Manager (.cam) file
  •  Save: save the current Crowd Asset Manager (.cam) file 
  •  Save As: save the current Crowd Asset Manager (.cam) file under a different name
  •  Reset Shaders: reset the shaders names according to the shaders currently attached to meshes in the open scene 
  •  Export Selection as FBX: export the selected character in a FBX file and create a corresponding geometry group
  •  Relocate FBX file: modify an existing geometry group by selection a new FBX file 
  •  Import FBX file: import the FBX file from the selected geometry group in the scene