In Atoms you can save your simulation on disk using Atoms caches, then it is possible to reuse these caches with the "cacheReader" behaviour module. The Atoms Cache is lightweight and fast and it can increase the performance of your level.
You can also twwak your caches with the cache reader module.
Exporting a cache
You can export a cache from within the points layout mode in the Modes panel.
You can add a slot for each agent group you want toe export in your cache and select an agent group.
Please note, agent group might not appear in the combo box after selecting them. Please click on the "Refresh" button to refresh the groups on each combo box.
There also few other options:
- Export path
- Start/End frame
- Skip frame Till Stating: if starting frame is greater than 1, all the frames before that won't be added to the cache
FPS: the interval used for caching frames.
Please note, if you are planning to export caches from Unreal and use them later, it's worth noting they might not look as smooth as caches exported from Atoms Crowd supported apps.
Cache Exporter
The cache exporter will export four files per frame:
- header: basic info such as number of agents at the current frame, number of created agents and number of deleted agents
- frame: agent data such as agent type, position, velocity, bbox and variation
- meta: agents metadata
- pose: agent skeleton data
To make the caches more portable, all the agent type files are saved in a subfolder next to your cache files. The cache will also have a file with no padding containing global infos, such as start frame, end frame, agent ids, etc.
Importing a cache
To import a cache from disk, create a new agent group and then attach a cacheReader module. Form the "cachePath" attribute you can set che cache path.