About the Project

This project used A* pathfinding to traverse a home based on Elvis's house, Graceland. As the home is two stories, It is 3D as well! You are able to select a random path for Elvis generated by A*, and can continue generating random paths until you find one that you like. Once you select a path, he will walk along it to his destination, and then you can pick another path for him to traverse!

Upon the start of the program, a "node map" is generated, which is simply a graph of nodes that Elvis could potentially reach. Based on obstacles (walls, columns, etc.), some nodes and connections that were automatically generated are removed, as shown in the demo. From there, A* runs once with two random nodes inputted to give him a beginning start and goal destination. Elvis is placed in this starting position as well.

The Elvis character is from Assignment 2, Linear Blend Skimming. Instead of him walking forwards, however, I had Elvis walk in place by downloading another mesh from Mixamo. From there, it was easy to translate and rotate him as he goes from node to node. I would have liked to use a spline curve and arc length parameterization to smooth his walk, but unfortunately I ran out of time.