Creating an Agent Group

Setting up the agent group

Maya

Please make sure the attribute editor is visible and select the agent group node.

Click on the "Add" button and add a gridLayout module. Type the agent type name you entered previously in the "agentType" field (i.e. testRobot). 
Set the "size" field to (3,0,3).

Then do one of the followings:

• Click again on the "Add" button and add a stateMachine module. 
• Click again on the "Add" button and add a clipReader module. Type the animation clip name you entered previously in the "clipName" field (i.e. robotWalk). Set the startFrame value to 0.

Click on Maya time slider rewind button and your 9 agents will appear in the viewport.
Hit the play button to run the simulation. 

Houdini

Go inside agentGroup1_geo node and select the grid1 object. Set the row and columns to 4 and 4. Then select the pointsLayout_direction and set the value to (1,0,1). Atoms creates an agent on every point of the mesh. You can edit the direction and agent type of each agents with the atoms_pointsLayout_directions and atoms_pointsLayout_agentTypes nodes.

Then do one of the followings:

• Click again on the "Add" button and add a stateMachine module. 
• Click again on the "Add" button and add a clipReader module. Type the animation clip name you entered previously in the "clipName" field (i.e. robotWalk). Set the startFrame value to 0.

Click on time slider rewind button.
Hit the play button to run the simulation.

Atoms Group GUI

With an agent group selected you will see the widget in the picture in the attribute editor.
The Agent Group GUI is divided in several sections:

• The modules list. From here you can add Behaviour Modules to your Agent Group. As explained in the Introduction,  Behaviour modules are used to customize your simulation. Each agent group has a stack of them which defines the behaviour of its agents. In the picture we added a gridLayout and a stateMachine modules.
  From this list you can add and remove modules, or move their position in the stack.
• Module Options. Here you can edit the module attributes. Each module attribute is actually a Maya attribute, so depending on its type it can be animated  or connected to any other Maya attribute.
  Whenever you see this icon next to an attribute, that means the attribute is overridable per agent. The icon turns green as any agent override is set. In the case of the picture, you might want to give to your agents a different state or make them playing with a different frameRate to speed up or slow down their animation.
• Settings. Here you can set the display type for your agent to: none, skeleton, mesh, skin, variation or lod. The mesh mode displays the proxy mesh, the skin mode displays the skinned mesh with textures and the skeleton mode will draw the agent skeletons. With the "none" mode the simulation will still be happening in the background, but you won't have any OpenGL overhead.
  From this section, you can also activate the agents selection tool, clear your agent selection or rewind your sim.
• Draw Metadata. From time to time you might need to see visually the metadata values for your agents. By ticking the "Draw Metadata" box and adding any metadata to the list at the bottom, Atoms will draw the metadata values per in the viewport. You can also change the font color and size, use a background color and apply an offset to the text.