The agent layout tool is your best companion for populating and editing your group layouts. Your agent group must have one of the following modules applied to use this tool: pointsLayout, cacheReader or any other layout module.

When the tool is active, you can access the tool attributes from the "Agent Layout Tool" widget. In Maya, you can also press the right mouse button inside the viewport, while in Houdini, you can also use the tool parameter dialog.

You can select agents from different agent groups and edit them at the same time.

You can activate the tool from the Atoms menu: Atoms > Tools > Agents Layout Tool or using the shelf button

Layout tool and Points layout module

Please make sure to be on the first frame of your simulation when adding or editing non-cached agents.

You have several modes for editing your agents: add, selection, move, rotate, scale, retime, variation and social layout.
You can set their parameters through the GUI or via the menu (right click on the viewport).

Add mode

Left Click to add agents in the viewport.
Ctrl+Left click and drag to edit the direction for the agents.
Shift+Left click and drag to rotate the layout (grid and Poisson)

There are different layout type for placing your agents: point, grid, poisson, polygon and mesh scatter.
All modes have some options you can tweak through the GUI.

In the ground mesh list, you can add reference meshes that the tool will use when placing your agents.
Make sure add the same ground mesh as a height field to your agent group; otherwise, your agents will intersect with the ground.

In the Agent Types list, you can select the agent types you will be adding to your agent group. If the "Random" checkbox is ticked, Atoms will pick an agent from the list randomly.
You can also provide a percentage distribution for your agent types with the given sliders. The percentage only works when the "Random" option is on.

Area placement (Maya Only). Use the left mouse button to draw the polygon point in the viewport and to close the polygon add a point on the same position of the first point. To move the polygon points, use the middle mouse button. You can control all the parameters from the layout tool UI, click the "Create Agents" button when you are happy with the samples to create the agents.

Selection mode

Left click and drag to select agents with the marquee tool or middle click to use the lasso tool.
Shift+Left click and drag to add agents to the selection.
Ctrl+Left click and drag to toggle agents.

You can erase agents by pressing the "Del" keyboard button, the "delete selected agents" button in the GUI or via the menu.
You can also change their agent types by pressing the "Change Agent Type" button.

With a cacheReader and pointsLayout modules, you can duplicate agents by pressing the "Duplicate Agents" button or CTRL+D.

With a points Layout module, you can optionally filter agents (instead of deleting them) using the "Filter Selected Agents" button.

"Apply To" option (Maya only): it is possible to select agents from all agent groups, visible agent groups or selected agent groups.

Selection Search

You can select agents using the following filters:

Use selected Agent Groups: will only select agents in the selected agent groups
Search Radius: will only select agents if two or more agents are closer than the given distance. When "Ignore one agent" is on, one agent won't be selected (this option is useful in case you are selecting agents that are too close to each other to delete them).
Percentage: will select a % number of agents.
Agent Type Name: will select the agents with the given agent type name
Metadata: will select agents with a metadata value within the given range (bool, int, double).
If the specified metadata is of "string" type, the metadata string value will be used for the search. Regular expressions might be used; for instance “variation.*“ (please note there is a “.“ and a “*“, this expands to any character repeated n times).

Override attributes

When an agent is selected, users can edit the overridable attributes of each module through the layout tool UI.

Move mode

Use the manipulator to move the selected agents.
Global and Local space modes are available.

Rotate mode

Use the manipulator to rotate the selected agents.
Global and Local space modes are available.

Scale mode

Use the manipulator to scale the selected agents.
Global and Local space modes are available.

Retime Mode

The retime mode works only on agent groups with cacheReader modules.

A circle on each agent will display the current time offset value. Users can click and drag on those circles to modify the time offset value. When the "group agents" option is activated, overlapping circles will be merged into a single entity, meaning dragging on those circles will modify all associated agents.
In the UI, there are also buttons for modifying/randomizing the time offset for the selected agents.

Finally, you have the option of setting the time offset to be in place or standard.
Please make sure you set this before editing your agents as the time offset modes evaluate the translation and rotation offsets in different ways.

Variation mode

The variation mode lets the user change the variation on the selected agents.
Variations can be randomized, copied and pasted.

Users can also edit variations on the fly with the UI (Maya Only).

Social layout mode

Social layout mode lets the user move/rotate the selected agents with the following methods:

average orientation
average position
look to centre
look to the reference object
orientation noise
distance noise
agent separation

Points Layout module

You can use the layout tool in conjunction with the pointsLayout module to:

add agents
offset, rotate and scale agents
delete agents
duplicate agents
set the agent variations
use the social layouting mode

Layout tool and other layouts

You can still use the layout tool with other layouts (gridLayout, meshScatterLayout, etc). Any additional behaviour module needed by the layout tool to work will be added automatically. You can:

offset, rotate and scale agents
delete agents
duplicate agents
set the agent variations
use the social layout mode

CacheReader module

You can use the layout tool with the cache reader module to:

offset, rotate and scale agents
delete agents
duplicate agents
time offset agents
set the agent variations
use the social layout mode

UsdCacheReader module

You can use the layout tool with the cache reader module to:

offset, rotate and scale agents
delete agents
duplicate agents
time offset agents
set the agent variations
use the social layout mode

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