External Entity

An External Entity Locator is a moving virtual cylinder object which can be taken into account by entities for avoidance. This locator has a position (which is obtained for a tracked Maya DAG object) and a radius.

 

Creating an external entity locator can be performed through the following options:

If a DAG Object is selected when the external entity locator is created, locator will automatically use this DAG object as tracked object. If several objects are selected, only the first selected object is used.

 

 

An External Entity Locator defines the following attributes:

 

 

Tracked Object	a Maya DAG object which gives the position of the entity to avoid, it is tracked in position. To know how to map two nodes, please refer to the usual manipulations
Radius Mode	The radius of the External Entity. It can be computed with different methods: Bounding Box Diagonal/2: half-size of the Maya DAG object bounding box diagonal Greater Bounding Box Size/2: half-size of the greater size of the Maya DAG object bounding box; Smaller Bounding Box Size/2: half-size of the smaller size of the Maya DAG object bounding box Mean Bounding Box Size/2: half-size of the mean size of the Maya DAG object bounding box sides Custom Radius.
Custom Radius	if the custom radius is used, this field specifies the radius of the External Entity. This attribute can be keyframed.

If the External Entity moves faster than crowd entities, or if crowd entities are really constrained, crowd entities may not manage to avoid correctly the External Entity: thus, collisions may occur. In that case, crowd entities will be stopped until the collision ends.